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Tsplines
For the past 3 weeks I have been feeling my way into tsplines. It is a Rhino plugin. One thing you can do with tsplines is "box modeling," the technique illustrated here.
Basically you start out with top front and side views of a fuselage, a Formula 1 car, a yacht hull or, as in the video, a porpoise. You then superimpose a box that would contain the object, or most of it. By pulling and tugging at the box, you make it conform to the shape of the porpoise, fuseslage, car or whatever, as prescribed by the 3-views. The dramatic moment in the video is about a third of the way through. The instructor toggles into what is called "smooth mode." This one click transforms the boxy, highly faceted porpoise into a perfectly curvaceous porpoise. From this point one can proceed by manipulating the curved surface. tsplines can do many other things, but this procedure for using 3 views to sculpt a box into a fuselage or hull or whatever particularly interested me. The finished shape can be converted back into NURBS (that is, into a Rhino object) at one click. |
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Tom |
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There is a function to add a parallel curve .. but it has some issues in some cases.. so I create a plane out of four points, place it to intersect with the fuse ( at the location where the rib / spacer should be and intersect this two surfaces.... the line created in this way is the result you have to just create a parallel / offset line in the thickness of the skin material ... so you have the outline of your desired part)
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Since good looking 3D pictures for manuals is part of my aim, I took the opposite approach, breaking down the model skin into surfaces simple enough to be successfully off set. Then union the bits back together if a single offset didn't work. As with all things Rhino, it doesn't like discontinuities and edges, so explode away the ugly seams, offset (as a solid) the simple surfaces and stitch the resultant pieces back together. Then using boolean difference with a slab to generated the actual former as a solid, then finally using mesh outline to find the largest part of the former, if its edge is to be bevelled by e.g. sanding. I prefer to do my offset early, and in a solid. Harpye seems to like to post process his actual curve outlines. . Now this is to an extent a stylistic choice. I want a perfect solid model first, that I can 'photograph', check for unwanted intersections and generally mull over. Once I am happy with a subassembly, I copy that to a new layer or a new file, create a special layer for actual cut curves, and take mesh outlines of everything, label them up with curved text, use subcurve delete to tab them, and then export them for lasering. |
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tsThicken
Hi Tom,
Yes, tsplines has a command similar to Rhino's Offset Surface. It is "tsThicken". (All tsplines commands have a "ts" prefix). tsThicken is less precise than Rhino's Offset Surface, so it is chiefly useful if you are modelling rapidly in tsplines and don't want to interrupt yourself and drop back into Rhino. (If you use a Rhino command on a tsplines model, it automatically kicks it back into NURBs -- not necessarily a good idea if you have a project in progress, because you must then re-convert into tsplines and pick up where you left off. In the end, once the tsplines model is finished, I would go back into Rhino follow the procedures worked out by Vintage. A helpful feature of tsplines is that from the very start, you have a unified, watertight surface. It will not crack and break and krinkle and fail Booleans. A NURBs surface will sometimes get pretty cranky. You don't have these particular frustrations in tsplines. However, there is of course a different set of frustations... It is a free download and runs for 30 days. Give it a try, see what you think. It does not have very many commands, so it isn't like taking on a major programming language like AutoCAD or Rhino. It is a plug-in. Michael |
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Laser?
Well last night I used a number of (slow) processes to build my stations ready for a .dxf export of my big fuselage. I haven't looked, but there must be a faster means of labelling parts than manually placing text/grouping with said objects. Perhaps there is a script for this, dunno--will check later this evening or maybe one of you guys already knows.
Anyways, met with our local laser guy today and checked out his work. His bed is 4x8', though his cut limit is 2x4 due to a lack of suitable substrate so it looks like I'm going to be giving him a bunch of files instead of one huge cut template for this project. Home Depot carries 1/8" luan ply for $9 (sweet) and Mike from Laser Etch Hawaii is going to do this one-off run for $50! AWESOME. Does T-Splines ever go on sale? I noted on Rhino's site last night that they specify current plugins will have to be recompiled to work with Rhino5-64. Anybody tried the combo of R5 64-bit WIP + T-Splines 2.1 out yet? Thanks for any input. C |
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Cool thread and very timely for me. I've played with Rhino for years but always cheated and did the easy stuff in Vextor XT, my CAD/CAM program and just used Rhino for the hard bits that Vector would choke on. I decided to take things to the next level and do my current build completely in Rhino.
Things are good but I do have one thing I haven't figured out yet. Rhino lets you name objects with in layers and name groups of objects/layers. You can easily get the layer name info by doing an edit layers but where the heck can you find the object name / group name information? Dan Eaton |
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Hello Dan
Layer name ... - you know the cake piece symbol ( edit layers) ... you could use to color or switch of the global layer infos???? That is one part. ( just for the layers) About the objects select - object properties ( rainbow tubus) and in the upcomming menue choose details down below!! There is the Object ID and some other useful data, as you are Rhino Skript programming .... could help!!! By the way - your F15 - at least the fuse ... seems to be a "one mesh" and looks very clean .... ( what datasource did you use?????) |
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Elliptical Wings
Well last night I was bored and decided to start designing a model for my father. This is my first take at doing a complete elliptical wing structure in Rhino and I ran into some problems with making my lightening holes in the ribs, mainly that I had to manually edit each curve used for Sweep2 process to create the solids that I used to boolean difference the holes out of the ribs.
I found that even though I had created elliptical offsets for these sweep curves that the interpolation between the root rib and the tip rib was not vertically aligned as it passed though the elliptical planform, so in the end I had to bend the solid to give it a vertical bow (viewed from front) using symmetry in the bend command, then had to follow with manually moving the solid vertically until it was centered throughout the entire sweep of ribs. All three solids created for making my lightening holes needed to be tweaked like this until I was happy with the spacing. Any tips for a better way to do this process where a simple lofting between two end curves does not apply? Carl |
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Hi Harpye,
Thanks for the suggestions. I knew about those. Doesn't seem to be anyway to get a complete list like you have with Layers. Guess I'll just have to make a list as I create things. The F-15 3D model was built up from a 3-view using Vector XT, my CAD/CAM program. Dan Eaton |
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