Rhino - Implicit History and Flow Along Surface
Software : Rhino
Level : Intermediate
Description :In this video tutorial I show how one can start to use Rhino’s implicit history tool for parametric design. The commands used are Loft, and FlowAlongSurface.
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Hi Dave, excellent tut (and website BTW)
Rhino is really getting even “awesomer” on an almost montly basis lately it seems. Will definitly be playing around with this technique, thanks a bunch
Thanks, I plan to keep looking into Rhino’s Parametric capabilities
Fantastic tutorial, simple and very useful. Thanks for sharing this incredible tips, your blog is awesome!
_davide
Thanks very much!! Feel free to post requests, the list is building up but i hope to get to them.
thanks ,
Dave
Wow…Rhino 4 is world’s better than 3. Looks like I’ll have to upgrade.
cool, i am really looking forward a good video tutorial of Implicit History .
very thx ~
keep going
Great tutorial… Keep up the good work
Hi guys, are you all getting a message ” an X number of objects have their history broken” after you switch record history on, and move some copied objects around? In this example, this message pops up after I move the copied elipse. Strange thing is, the surface follow the moved elipse as if history has been intact. There is an option to “not show this message again”, but I just wondered if anyone knows what the true implications are with that message. As for this exercise, everything works perfectly even though the message just keeps popping up.
Secondarily, I wonder what is the best way to remedy the program of the hexagons not connecting near the one edge of the surface. I tried to draw the rectangular plane to fit tightly to the array of hexagons with snaps to no avail. I guess it has to do with rhino trying to stretch the hexagon to fit the surface curvature, but then the curvature is too great at the pinched corner of an elipse so it just refuses to connect the edges?
hmmm…. I didn’t get that error. Make sure your History is staying on. By Default it turns off after every action.
I need to look into matching up the hexagons. thats a bit tricky.
That error comes from “History Break Warning” being check marked. Like I said, the warning does not hamper the model, since the model updates regardless of warning. I have “always record history” on too, and no problems so far.
As for matching up geometry, here is a procedure that I am thinking of: I can loft a surface, unfold it, and array different kinds of shapes to form a perfect fit pattern over the unfolded surface. After that, use flow along surface and set RIGID to Yes. I hope to use a finer grain pattern near the seams and see if the components will wrap around the surface.
So I tried the loft, unfold and flow along surface with Rigid=Yes this week. There are several problems with this method. Firstly, unrollsrf only works with Developable Surfaces. Therefore, I had to divide the lofted surfaces into many ellipses first, and loft small pieces of developable surface with the developable surface plugin. Then I had to merge the strips back into one big surface, and then unroll srf. After that I overlaid a pattern of surfaces on the unrolled surface, trimmed the pattern to fit inside the unrolled surface (took way too long, I don’t know if grouping the shapes will help…). Then I did flow along surface with Rigid=Yes, but the problem was that the flow along surface command doesn’t allow me to change U,V orientation so the pattern was all mangled and messed up. I can’t even begin to see how it rationalizes the component population pattern. With Rigid=off, the patterns bend and stretches alot, mangles in certain places, and left several “gaps” between the patterns.
The paneling plugin is good for making regular and repeated panels, but I haven’t figured out if it will be able to take several components and populate the surface with them. Currently, I use paracloud for doing such things. I hope to be able to do that with paneling tools, flowalongsrf and ExplicitHistory with the ability to set components to Rigid=Yes.
great write up. I really appreciate the contribution.
How do you like paracloud so far? I find it to be a bit difficult to use. I’m hoping with the paneling tool and eventually explicit history we will be able to achieve similar results.
Paracloud is good when you’ve gone through an early schematic design, and have several ideas that you want to further investigate. It is because Paracloud ability to easily link geometry from Rhino to Excel, and its ability to designate specific components to be populated on surfaces precisely where you want them to be via the matrix. It is not the fastest nor the most intuitive, but when you want to have some data-driven (or I like to think of it as data-assisted) design, such as solar exposure on a facade, or wind penetration through perforations on facades or roofs, it is great to use Paracloud as a link. I also saw David’s 3dmax tutorials with techniques aiming at resolving similar design concerns, one involves importing heightmaps, and the other one called parametric panels - responds to sun. Paracloud has an internal sun-exposure calculation tool and will generate the data onto your surface matrix, however, I needed to study my model in an urban environment, where there are tall shadows from neighbours. I used another tool and got exposure maps on the extreme days of sun exposure as images, and I will try and see if I can treat that as a “heightmap” on a facade. Paracloud can import images and create a matrix out of black and white heightmaps, and I was told that they are working on interpreting color maps for later versions. I will try David’s 3dmax method for quick modelling, and will use Paracloud when the design of the overall massing and the facade components are more solidified. Now if Paracloud and Explicit History can work together…
Hello David.
I have been trying to use FlowAlongSruf. But everytime i do it. it turns the pattern horizontal and the surface faces in-ward of the lofted surface.
It is a 3D pattern which I’m trying to map. I don’t think it maters. It’s to give you the whole picture.
Do you have any idea why this is happening.
rotate your pattern 90 degrees then try again.
Dave
cool to see rhinos doing this as well.
the fact that it scales on a surface is neat.
I moved to Alias after seeing the Conform tool which has been doing this for awhile. Alias keeps the original size of the hexagons with minimal distortion. super important if you wanted to wrap tiles like in this case or an actual texture on another surface. especially logos and badges. model them flat and then place them on. even works across multiple surfaces!
thanks for the video