Thickening a mesh is an important step in producing printable objects.
Weaverbird
Weaverbird (developed by Giulio Piacentino) is a topological mesh editing tool for Grasshopper. It is an essential tool for working with Meshes in Rhino and Grasshopper.
Mesh Thicken or wbThicken is a Weaverbird component which offsets a mesh to give it a 'thickness'. Mesh Thicken uses an algorithm to offset the individual vertices of a mesh and construct new faces.
This component can be used to convert an open mesh to a closed mesh in certain circumstances.
Figure 0.1 - wbThicken Component
Use Case
This definition can be used to give a thickness to an open mesh. This definition can also be used to add thickness to a closed mesh. This definition does not work well when a contains non-manifold edges or intersecting faces. The [Check] command can be used to verify that this is the case.
Figure 1.0 - Shell with all backfaces visible.
Definition
This definition first references the mesh using the Mesh component.
The wbThicken component is used to offset the mesh normals to a distance, [D].
A panel is used to specify the distance as -2.
A Positive offset distance will result in a larger mesh that has been offset outward. A negative offset distance offsets inward.
2 mm is chosen as the offset distance as this is the minimum thickness recommended for 3D Printing.
