Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Rajaa Issa on March 31, 2011 at 5:30am

Hi Annie,

 

You have few options to deal with non-planar panels:

 

- If panels are developable (can be unrolled), then ptUnrollFaces or Rhino Unroll command should work.

 

- In a non-developable surfaces, you have 3 options:

  - User Rhino Smash command.  It will depend on the material, but it can be successful in many cases. Please check the help file for details.

  - Use Squish command in "Advanced Flattening" plugin from Rhino Labs.  While you might find it more successful that squish, it also is not guaranteed to work in all cases.  There is the download and documentation:

http://wiki.mcneel.com/labs/advancedflattening

 

In both of the cases above, you'll need the machines that does the rolling and bending of material.

 

The third solution is to try and create quad (planar)  paneling from your grid by wiggling the grid within some tolerance that the user defines.  The command has an option to triangulate the quad panels that were not successfully made planar within tolerance.  Command name is ptPanelGridQuads.

 

If you already have a surface that you like to triangulate, you need to convert to  mesh first, triangulate, then use Rhino's mesh to nurbs tool to get the nurbs. You need to pay attention to meshing options to get lowest possible rte of triangles.

 

I will write a tool for PanelingTools to triangulate quad panels to simplify the process.

Permalink Reply by Rajaa Issa on April 1, 2011 at 4:39pm

Annie,

Added a new command to PanelingTools called "ptTriangulateFaces" that should do what you need. This will become available when the next Rhino 5.0 WIP is released.