Thanks Kristoff

Yes, I was pleased to see my stones being used in your stone buttress. It is hard work packing them by hand (in the real and virtual worlds). Our first software release will be for packing polygons into a rectangular area so suitable for simple paving jobs. We will have something to build a stone buttress like in the photo on your other post but it will be more than a year away. I think you signed up for our newsletter so keep your eye on it.

I haven't been a regular user of these forums but as we start to produce something worth sharing, and hopefully a Sketchup plugin, you might see me here more often

Malcolm

You are right Mike about this sort of technology being useful for seawalls built with large rocks. Interestingly, already the 10 tonne or 20 tonne rocks are often numbered as they leave the quarry and the excavator operators at the site have a screen showing the location of the machine. So Rocksolver should plug into that system fairly easily.

We'll first test Rocksolver on simple 2D applications like paving then move into the larger structures market before refining the method for building drystone walls and houses. Maybe one day the wearer of "Google glasses" will see where each rock needs to be placed using augmented reality.

It's a work in progress. In the mean time please help yourself to my virtual rocks in the Intresto collection.

Malcolm (the Rocksolver guy)

Great model bokomofo.
I had a play with sketchyphysics and found that if I define each rock as a convex hull they fall against each other quite naturally so no floating rocks. See attached image. The left hand image is from the original non-physics collection of rocks (the dry stone wall in the intresto collection on 3dwarehouse), the middle image are the convex hull rocks moved apart so they don't intersect and the right hand image after letting them fall inside a hidden container. Don't know why the textures changed when I turned the rocks into convex hulls.
Malbert (aka intresto)

Nice model bocomofo, thanks. Great to see the rocks are being put to good use. I didn't know about Sketchyphysics so I'll have to try it. I'm working on software to pack the rocks so they are a tighter fit. You can see the first attempt as the dry-stone wall in the intresto collection in 3dwarehouse. Real-world gabions often have the rocks visible on the front face arranged manually and the rocks behind poured in via a chute. The tighter packed rocks on the front face gives them a neater appearance. I'm working on it. Yours look pretty good though.
Malbert (aka intresto)