Thicken a Mesh with Grasshopper
Thickening a mesh is an important step in producing printable objects.
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
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.
- This definition first references the mesh using the
Meshcomponent. - The
wbThickencomponent is used to offset the mesh normals to a distance,[D].- A
panelis 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.
- The
wbLoopis a subdivision component which refines or smooths a mesh. - The other components in this definition are used to bake the output mesh with custom colours and names.
Figure 2.0 - Basic wbThicken Definition
The geometry should be output as a
"Closed Mesh" in order for the object to be printable.
Figure 3.0 - Output Geometry
The above grasshopper definition can be downloaded here:
ThickenMesh.gh
24KB
Text
ThickenMesh (Requires Weaverbird for Grasshopper)
Last modified 3yr ago