how to blend/bridge more than two objects?

[andstef]

Hello,

i'm playing around with 3d voronoi cells in 3ds max and i'm having trouble making the edges of those cells roundish, organic. I tried the connect compound object but that works fine for just two objects, not for more than that. Bridge in edit poly doesn't work either.

Any ideas?

I'm attaching an image to for you to get a better idea of what i'm trying to achive.

[Peter M. Gruhn]

I'd show you how I did it, but I tried gussying it up with Swift Loop with Flow after having forgotten that that is pretty much a guaranteed crash for me.

 

So I'll try to tell you.

 

The different faces are the "top" and "bottom" ones the move forward to meet at a triangle. Left those alone for starters and just bridged all the rest. That left a big triangle hole at top and bottom. Select those borders and cap.

 

"Done."

 

TurboSmooth makes it prettier. Could maybe have bridged with more than one poly and done a soft selection scale. The first click on swift loop did a great job, and another click to the left and right probably would have made it excellent. But it crashed after showing the first. Suspect it's a rare enough problem so it may work awesome for you.

 

Now, you tell me you want to make a hundred of them? Um... hire an intern?

 

The problem looks like something that should have a NURBS solution.

 

I can thin of a solution that involves making pointy ends of the cylinders and bringing them together to mitre nicely then maybe relaxing or something those verts. ... yeah, that worked OK. MeshSmooth instead of Relax. And it has an "Apply To Whole Mesh button that can be turned off.

 

On the NURBS front, N Blend tried to work. And trying to learn more about it... it crashed.

[andstef]

Thank you very much,

the method you described will definitely work, it's going to be a lot of selecting polys and bridging but... there is no easy way to the things you like (unless you like really simple things)

 

Thank you again

[Peter M. Gruhn]

There may be an easy way, it's just beyond me.

 

Can you make one and instance it?

[Claudio Branch]

The best way to approach this problem is to use Surface Modeling tools...

[andstef]

Thank's Claudio, I think that's just what I'm looking for

with the risk of "sounding" stupid, may I ask of what Surface Modeling tools are you referring to ? am max plugin, another application?

Edited January 20, 2010 by andstef
forgot to ask...

[andstef]

@Peter: That is one of the big problem with voronoi cells, the probability that there will be two alike is quite low (unless you model those on a grid and the centers are at equal distances)

[Peter M. Gruhn]

> not same

 

Good point. Is this a time to look at the larger scene? Why are you getting these cylinders that need to be joined this way? Would an approach like so work for your circumstances: divide a poly. Chamfer the edges or inset the faces, remove the interiors, shell the remainder and smooth the result?

[Claudio Branch]

 

...may I ask of what Surface Modeling tools are you referring to ?

 

 

Max...the modifiers are Edit Spline, CrossSection, Surface, and Shell

[andstef]

I don't know how you did that with CrossSection, my only result is a twisted thing intersecting itself.

Maybe i should learn more about this "mysterious" modifier, later today...

[CarlAhearne]

Claudio, maybe a little more insight into how you did this would be very useful... You've ended up with a very clean surface, and it would be great to know how you did it... Did you split your original circles in half, and then join them 1 by 1, then fill in the gap in the middle?

Edited January 21, 2010 by CarlAhearne

[Claudio Branch]

You only need to surface model 1/3 of the form.

 

The shape of the surface "cage" is comprised of 3 half circles - the middle half circle in the cage is the outside edge where any two tubes intersect.

 

The shape and position of the middle circle is the trickiest. I ended up using a little trigonometry to move it exactly where I wanted and to make the final form perfect.

 

Then you can create an array of 3, attach them all and use Editable Poly's Bridge command to fill in the gaps. Apply the Shell modifier at the very end.

[BrianKitts]

Fran's mug tutorial could be a good start for you. The part where you attach the handle to the mug should shed some light on your situation.

 

http://surrealstructures.com/blog/?p=501#more-501

[Claudio Branch]

Here is a shot of the steps I took to make the form. It should be fairly obvious that the only thing left to do is to use Editable Poly (Bridge) to fill in the gaps and apply the Shell modifer.

 

When building the spline cage, use the Bezier spline option within the CrossSection modifer parameters to make the outside walls of the tubes bend nicely.

 

The position of the pivot point is critical if you want all the vertices to line up to form nice round tubes. You can eyeball it, but using a trig function such as tangent, sine, or cosine, will give you the exact values to move the vertices in X and Y based on whatever radius you use for your tubes.

 

I hope this is somewhat helpful...

[andstef]

Thank you Claudio for sharing this, it's quite useful.

 

Now, I'll explain what I am doing:

First of all, this is just a test, I'm not working on the final project yet.

 

-first I create the voronoi cells using this script (I personally don't know maxscript) http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/voronoi-cells

which fills a bounding box with voronoi cells using points which can be placed manually or randomly (as seen in image 1), and as a result I obtain individual cells (like the one in image 2)

 

-then I attached all the cells, and applied a lattice modifier (the cylinders resulted from this), the result in image 3

 

-I applied an Edit Poly modifier and deleted overlapping struts

 

-a second Edit Poly modifier (animate option) was applied to chamfer (with the open option ON) the borders (as the cylinders were not capped by the lattice modifier)

 

-the third Edit Poly modifier I used to bridge the edges (sadomasochistic work)

 

-and finally Turbo Smooth to smooth the whole thing (and this is image 4)

 

And I don't think that doing this kind of modeling for objects with a lot more cells (like a 3d curtain wall) is good for my mental health.

 

I even tried blob mesh but with no success.

 

So? does anyone have any ideas?

[andstef]

well?? ideas??

a friend suggested that I should write a script to generate objects in the nods and bridge those?

as I said earlier, I don't know script, but is it hard to learn? Any script guru?

[UAP]

Howdy.

 

been using the voronioi script for some experiments lately, and came across this thread while researching. after looking at the problem for a few minutes, i tried out a cheat approach and the result isn't too horrible.

 

 

it's not exactly tubing, but i guess it get's the idea across. i can detail the process if you haven't found an alternative since last time.

[andstef]

Helo,

 

I thought this thread was dead

 

I sure would like to know how you managed to do that.

 

Thank you