Workflow in order to create panelled, custom mesh on mesh for 3D printing

Hello, 

I’m a fine arts graduate student who's been looking into grasshopper over the past year. I’ve done the very basics, the tutorials and taken a course in it (though I'm still struggling with data trees). I’ve been working on a project inspired by work done at the University of Waterloo  and I’m interested in replicating the effect of this model for the purpose of 3d printing. 

I’ve been lurking on the forums for some time to try to figure out the best way at attempting this. I had tried to panel the mesh through creating bounding boxes (this worked for the NURBS sphere test), inspired by the advice given on this thread by Martin Dembski and Konrad Sobon. I integrated parts of their files into the work I had done. (See GH file)

I want to replicate the effects I was able to get with the tiled NURBS sphere I created (Test pattern )onto the more complicated mesh I create (Bird Model), to achieve the look of this model from UW. I was able to successfully 3d print my test models, but now I'm stuck. My question is: am I following the wrong terminology with this, and if so what kind of workflow should I follow?

Thanks!

(Feel free to move this discussion if I didn't post in the right category, apologies in advance for poor forum decorum!)