Surface panel mode (again)

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Santiago Garay on October 18, 2018 at 10:20am

Hi Magnus,

If I understand correctly, you would like to create a  panel with 5 sides, unfortunately that would be challenging since SkinDesigner only accepts 3 or 4-side surfaces at the moment for the surface-panel mode.

I did a quick test dividing the surfaces in triangles and guads, and sent that to the skin generator, the issue with that is that you will have miss-alignments on those wood slats. See image below.

You might find a way to get the wood slats to align with some work, but either way I'm not sure that's the way you want to go for this project. 

By the way, seems like you have some old components mixed with new ones in that script, I would make sure you don't have duplicate components in your SkinDesigner menu, they should all be on version 0.5. I attached the updated script I used for the output below.

181018_skindesignerquestion-rev.gh

Santiago

Permalink Reply by Magnus Larsson on October 22, 2018 at 5:35am

Hi Santiago,

Thanks for your super quick reply, and apologies for not getting back to you sooner - just got back in front of my work computer, where I can try this out. 

Thank you very much for the advice and assistance: we're getting really close to what I'm trying to achieve for this particular project, and this is becoming super useful for other projects ahead as well. Indeed, I'll more or less be able to use what we have now as it gives me the outlines of the panels, which I could reorient/unfold and feed to the CNC as a cutting pattern.

I don't mind the mis-alignments so much, though I'd like to work with larger quads if possible (basically merging neighbouring planar surfaces into larger polygons - I'll sort this out in my definition). Then the mis-alignments will happen around the "silhouette edge" of each cell and won't be as prominent as now.

However, I do have one question for you: the generated panels do not have the same dimensions that I tried to define (indeed and perhaps weirdly twice - both in the box I use as input geometry and in the SkinDesigner_panel component). In your example they have changed from a width of 120mm to 42mm, and from a thickness of 21mm to 2mm. Is there a way to keep those dimensions intact while mapping the geometry to the skin?

I'll clean up my SkinDesigner versions, thanks for pointing that out. And I really should take a deep breath and start looking at the code behind the scenes here (then I could have spotted the 5-sides surface panel mode issue myself), but I don't speak Python, so that adventure might have to happen a little later.

All best,
Magnus

Permalink Reply by Santiago Garay on October 23, 2018 at 8:08am

Hi Magnus,

I did take a look at the issues with the dimensions. Was a combination of two separate problems.

First, I realized the Center Box component creating the custom geometry solid did not have the right dimensions not orientation needed, was twice as large and not aligned with the panel orientations (use the panel viewer to guide you on that). I did create the solid with the Domain Box component to get the correct panel geometry dimensions and orientation.

Secondly, the 2mm vs 22mm issue was a bug on my side, clearly have not tested out custom geometry on these units enough to come across this, so thank you for that! :)

Also as I was testing this I found an issue with mm units on triangular surfaces on Surface panel mode inside the Skin Generator, something that would cause the triangular panels to be discarded in the solution depending on your tolerance value. Even though that should always work now I would point out that the smaller the tolerance value in your scene the better the accuracy of these triangular panels. A value of 0.01 would probably be more than enough for this project. 

Note that even though the script I attached has the fixed components, the SkindDesigner and SkinGenerator components will be updated also in the Github, so feel free to download them into your user objects folder to have them up to date in your menu.

Now on the for the 4-side limitation, that's something I should probably warn users in a message better than the "Invalid Surfaces" output that is shown now, shouldn't need to look at the code to find figure that out! 

Let me know if this helps or if you have other issues, I attached the script below.

Santiago

181018_skindesignerquestion-rev_2.gh

Permalink Reply by Santiago Garay on October 23, 2018 at 8:19am

...and one more thing, you can always use the flip option to reverse the panel geometry.