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...)

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Permalink Reply by robert cervellione on February 13, 2010 at 6:31am

i am using 6.0059. there should be no issue. do you happen to have other custom gha components installed?

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Permalink Reply by Ivan Kiryakov on February 13, 2010 at 9:11am

hey robert
is there any chance this supports closed curves?maybe in the next release or so?
is it possible?
looking forward for your next releases !

cheers

ivan

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Permalink Reply by robert cervellione on February 13, 2010 at 10:07am

what did you have in mind for a closed curve?
i have a version that uses 2 closed curves and creates the surface between them. is that what you had in mind?

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Permalink Reply by to] on February 13, 2010 at 10:11am

hey robert
sounds great ;)
looking forward to your nparticles plug-in
really great work ....

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Permalink Reply by Ivan Kiryakov on February 13, 2010 at 11:02am

yes exactly!
this will be great!
thanks

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Permalink Reply by robert cervellione on February 14, 2010 at 7:10am

i will try to get this into a gha component as soon as i can

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Permalink Reply by to] on February 13, 2010 at 10:08am

hi ivan
i don't want to speak for robert....
but why are you not preparing your curves before sending them to the minimal surface component?
with that input robert currently defined there is the freedom to input what you want so may 4 polylines (with a linecount of 3 maybe per polyline) or 3 curves with one polyline
so my opinion is the component works the way it should
otherwise he had to add additional variables if you want to split or not and so on and so on
so for your wish for closed polylines how should that work? if you feed in a polyline with a line-count of 5? are only 4 lines allowed?
hope that helps you a little...

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Permalink Reply by Carlo Beltracchi on February 13, 2010 at 4:28pm

Fixed!
I had a problem with the download and missed some files!

Now all right: I'm going to play with it :)

Thank you all!

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Permalink Reply by Wieland Schmidt on February 26, 2010 at 7:14am

Hi Robert,

thanks for your minimal surface generator! It is very convenient to use and a great tool to design membrane surfaces.

Wieland

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Permalink Reply by robert cervellione on February 26, 2010 at 7:37am

i am glad you like it. i am in the middle of a project but as soon as that is over i will finish the rest of it which will give you the boundary minSurf, minsurf with 2 closed curves, 2 open curves, and catenery curves

-robert