How to generate effective solids from massive DLA points?

Hi! Please help, I'm very new to GH. Recently in a architecture design I wrote a piece of rhinoscript to generate 3d DLA trees, but the problem is I can never transform the points and lines into effective solid.

As you can see, the tree is basically formed by branch-like lines and points. Simply connecting the points to get a mesh or something proved to be useless. The topology was extremely weird since the points are not originally extracted from a existing surface!

I am trying to get a envelope which contains all the points and somehow reflects the space distribution of them. Making pipes out of them probably is not a good idea( no usable space defination). Metaballs would be a least choice because someone else in our studio has already used the same method before:(

An idea was to use delaunay meshes so that I could get a polygon form. It failed too because I don't know how to let GH identify the points that should be forming a mesh. I would get something like this:

Another rather desperate attempt was to voxelize the tree so that at least I could have some volumes......But still is there any way to make it look more "organic"? I already tried Tsplines but the topology was too complex for it to process.

(in the picture above I also tried to give all the points integer coodinates so that they can fit into a 3d lattice)

So, as you can see I'm literally trying everything. Please give any help or advise to this beginner here!

A lot of thanks in advance!

Minquan

Attachments:

dla tree.3dm, 2.9 MB

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by alex jenter on March 12, 2013 at 9:52pm

try this!

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/profiles/blogs/introducing-exoskeleton...

Permalink Reply by David Stasiuk on March 13, 2013 at 12:20am

Yes, try exoskeleton. You should also definitely find Daniel's Topologizer component as well...it will help you clean up your lines before feeding them in. One thing about exoskeleton is that if your line lengths end up being shorter than the nodes around the connection points, the mesh breaks down. With topologizer you can eliminate too-short segments.

Permalink Reply by David Stasiuk on March 13, 2013 at 1:44am

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/profiles/blogs/topologizer-network-cle...

With the example you have above, I would definitely recommend playing with a small selection first in order to match all of the settings to the scale of your model. Hey if you get it to work, could you post the results! Looks like it could be pretty amazing.

Permalink Reply by Minquan Wang on March 14, 2013 at 2:01am

Thanks for help David! But this is probably not what I wanted......I checked the tool out and got fairly impressive outcomes, but my partner and I both regarded them as too hard to apply to the architectural space we were after. You know, you can't just design a gallery with tubes!

However earlier today I tried to rewrite my script and got this:

It derived from the "voxelized" tree above. The idea is to replace the voxel cubes with polygon cells. Each cell has faces of either squares or hexagons, so, with proper management of the 3D lattice, every two adjacent cells can fit with each other! Though there is still a longway to go at least this finally reached some solids without being too boring:)

Thanks again for the reply!

Permalink Reply by Michael Pryor on March 13, 2013 at 9:03am

How about something like this. needs weaverbird and starling. This is just for overall volume though.

Attachments:

wrap points.gh, 62 KB

Permalink Reply by Minquan Wang on March 14, 2013 at 1:47am

Thanks for the advise. This is somehow close to what I imagined! But is there a method to modify the definition so that the point could be enveloped more "locally"? I mean, I was supposed to reflect the branching pattern with the form.

Anyway, thanks again for your time!

Permalink Reply by Michael Pryor on March 15, 2013 at 9:31pm

What about joining your voxelation and running it through weaver bird?