Fishing net modeling

olishea

I'm wondering if there is a way to turn hidden geometry lines into edges !?

Yes, unsoften them. Select all and slide the soften edges slider. Uncheck both the boxes too.

willipop

Thx Oli ! I noticed we can change the weight of the edges in the style option but it is just for the display and it do not affect the weight of the shadows casted. Is there any other way too make the edges solid ?

willipop

Here is a try I did today.

1- Sarted with a rectangle
2- Applyed several time the subdivide selection tool from artisan
3- Applyed the subdivide and smooth tool from artisan
4- Turned on hidden line and selected style wireframe
5- Selected the lines and get rid of the smoothing edges to get edges
6- copied those edges
7- Finally I used tube to cylinder plugin and It took 10 min approx of working progress

I'll have no choice to go with this kind of work flow if I don't find anything better than this. End of semester is coming fast

olishea

there is also latticemaker and windowizer.

Box

I think you are going the wrong way and making life hard for yourself.
This took no time at all using tig's tool.
A bit of thought and a few lines and you can make something very complex.
Make a few pieces that fit together, scale some, array some......

Quick Net.skp

olishea

nice

DOD3R

you should check Ferrari sketch plugin
its actually special program fro tensile structures

D.

Box

Ferrari is a good tool for tensile, but you can spend a lot of time getting it to the shape you want and then you need to separate out the profiles to make your ropes.
This was done with 3 beziers curves on a square, then tig's Extrude edges to lattice to produce the web, then lines to tubes.
All in all it almost took longer to write this than to make it.

willipop

Very nice ! The shape of it looks more square than round. It will play with this method tonight to see what I can do. Many thanks !

Box

Anything is possible, use curves, use diagonals, stretch the mesh, bend the mesh etc etc

olishea

that's really cool box. Can I ask why you are using lines to tubes? Is there not a TIG lattice tool that makes square sections, or are you just setting the amount of edges to 4?

Box

No credit to me Oli, it's Tig's plugin that does all the work.

No, I set it to 5 just to give it more of a rounded effect.

And I was simply using tig's lattice for the lines so you can easily reshape them then make them tubes after.

willipop

Is it possible to set the parameters for the distance between the lines ?

olishea

I have found a better way of doing this using my "cave technique"....start off with a grid and ONLY use quads. I'll post a screenshot very shortly. It looks sweet.

TIG

Using my EEbyLattice the 'spacing' is set by the segmentation of the 4 curves.
Draw those edges the distances apart you require and 'weld' them into the curves...
Then the 'net will have segments the distances you want - at least when it starts off - of course they must be adjusted as the mesh surface is formed

willipop

Oli I like your caves very much, well done

olishea

I know my example is too uniform, but this is how I'd personally go about it. You can change the distances between the nets too, make them bigger, smaller etc.

Now you just need to reduce the amount of poles where the nets meet.

The bottom variation ,I just used artisan sculpt tool; however it creates many triangles.

And thanks willipop!

willipop

It's what I tried previously Also I used the artisan's selection tool to select the faces with less vertex and I applied the subdivide tool too add some more vertex.

olishea

Here is another. Possibilities are endless really. I intersected the large cones too much though, they don't need to be made up into quads like that, I just wasn't thinking and it causes a more square-like shape than the smaller cones. All rectifiable though.

I didn't attempt to convert the second mesh (with 2 artisan iterations) to tubes because my xbox isn't going to play itself tonight!

olishea

This is what I meant about the larger cones....the mesh on the right performs better than the mesh on the left which had unnecessary vertices. The larger cones are now rounded as opposed to slightly squared.