minimal surfaces

i have been a Generative Components user for a long time and only an occasional grasshopper user. but i have been using it more and though i would start to port my C# libraries over. the first one is a minimal surface generator. i will release it as soon as i get 2 bugs worked out.

here are some screen shots. the calculations are fast enough for real time feedback which is good.

the plugin takes 4 boundary curves and stretches a minimal surface between them (think of the 4 curves as wires you dip in soap like frei otto)

after i finish this i may port over a plugin that can read maya nParticles in real time and display them as point clouds with all the extra data (acceleration, speed, size, color...)

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Daniel Piker on March 28, 2010 at 12:30pm

Yes, an interesting test case. Here's a Kangaroo take on it. (kangaroo on the left, to]'s membrane file on the right)
As expected, the simple spring network model doesn't give exact minimal surfaces, but it's a fairly close approximation.

Permalink Reply by Alpha222 on September 19, 2010 at 6:38am

Hi Daniel, the Kangaroo solution seems good enough. would you give me more clues?? Pray you could see this .

Permalink Reply by robert cervellione on March 28, 2010 at 10:04am

how quickly you noticed this. there seams to be a little bug. i am close to solving it! thanks for letting me know

Permalink Reply by robert cervellione on March 30, 2010 at 10:09pm

ok so i fixed the problem. thanks for showing me this

in the image the orange is the new minimalSurface and the grey was your original rhinoMembrane. the rhino membrane had a area of 32.6299432 (+/- 1e-08) square meters and i was able to get my surface to 32.4830499 (+/- 1.5e-06) square meters. i will package it and post it soon.

Permalink Reply by to] on March 31, 2010 at 3:42am

hey great, no prob
looking forward to test it again ;)

Permalink Reply by Carlo Beltracchi on March 28, 2010 at 8:54am

GREAT!!!!!!

THANK YOU!!!!!!!!

Permalink Reply by Luca Ottaviani on March 31, 2010 at 4:57am

Well done....
thank you robert!!!

Permalink Reply by robert cervellione on April 12, 2010 at 8:31am

The minimal surface plugin for grasshopper has been updated. below is a list of what is new. you can find the download on my site www.cerver.org

1.You now have control over the u and v resolution independently.

2. Set the iteration parameter ‘I” to 0 to have the amount of iteration automatically computed to return the minimal solution based on your U/V values. Note that this takes a very long time to calculate due to the time it takes rhino calculates surface information.

3. The "P" output are now created as a 2D array (Grasshopper data tree)

Also note:

This plug-in is designed for form finding and does not automatically compute the optimum U/V/I values to get to the most minimal solution. I will add this in the future but play with the U/V/I parameters in order to find the optimum solution. As a designer always returning the optimum solution is not always best so I leave the parameters flexible in order to produce a range of results.

Permalink Reply by Wieland Schmidt on April 12, 2010 at 9:02am