3D Triangular Grid

Hey everybody, I'm new to Grasshopper and I find it really hard to get into it, but I'm trying to do my best :D But I hope someone can help me.

First of all: What do I want achieve?

I wand to build a sort of a helmet with mirroring triangular tubes on it, or better, the helmet should be build of these tubes. The idea is, that when you got the helmet on and look through it (yeah, the face is covered by the helmet too, like a visor) you get kind of a kaleidoscopic effect.

First I modeled a simple surface in rhino (basicaly a cutted ball) that should be the helmets inner surface. Then I tried to set up 2 triangular grids in Grasshopper which I lofted to create the 'tubes'. And now I'm stuck: I don't know how to orientate the grids or the lofts onto the surface.

Is that even possible with 2Dgrids or is the whole approach totally wrong?

I attached the internalized gh-file and a screenshot, I hope this helps explaining what my intention is..

I would really appretiate some help, thanks :)

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Permalink Reply by David Rutten on December 3, 2015 at 4:36am

Whether or not the approach is wrong depends on your constraints for the tubes in the helmet. Is every tube supposed to have the same cross-section? If so, then yes, your current approach is flawed as you cannot map from a flat surface onto a sphere without distorting the geometry.

If you're okay with having differently shaped triangle cross sections then this approach may work, but you still need to decide what area of the helmet is supposed to be covered by the triangles. Morphing from a flat plane onto a full sphere typically gets you very strong distortions, and anyway your eyes can only see a part of the sphere, so we need to somehow figure out which part of the helmet sphere should be populated by tubes.

I think in general it would be easier to put the triangles on the helmet first and perform the extrusion later though.

Permalink Reply by DaFiXi on December 3, 2015 at 6:32am

David, thanks for the reply.

The triangle cross sections got to have the same aspect ratio, but can vary in size - but they don't have to! I think I'm gonna stick with all the same size for the moment.

The general approach, to map the triangles onto the surface, is what I was thinking of, too. I think the surface is only a placeholder for the overall form of the helmet, therefore it can be build right out of the triangual grid/pattern. My problem is that I don't know how that works. I tried to mesh the surface and to edit it, but it didn't work out since I can't replicate the original pattern (which is the 2d triangular grid)

You know a tutorial or woraround for this?

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