Friday, October 15, 2010

Non-Manifold Edges

There was a question on the Rhino group on LinkedIn about booleans failing due to "Non-Manifold" edges and just what that meant. There are two cases that fall under that heading, and in both cases if your model has them it means you've created a set of surfaces that could not in theory be turned into a real part(not by any conventional means like machining, rapid prototyping processes have their own rules.)

The first case, I'll explain using the simple case of 2D lines. Imagine you've got two lines that form a 90 degree corner, and a third that bisects the angle, so you have three lines meeting at one point. Rhino doesn't let you "Join" those 3 curves into one.

While such geometry is "illegal" for manufacturing purposes, it is actually not uncommon to to work with if you use FEA, so V5 has a tool called NonManifoldMerge that will let you create a polysurface like that pictured, it automatically splits and joins up all the edges of all the surfaces where they intersect.

Now in the second case, imagine if you have something like a sphere with a smaller sphere completely inside it, not intersecting at all, and you try to "boolean" the smaller one from the bigger one, if it would let you do it that would also be a non-manifold shape.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Recent Project



Automating the production of cutting patterns for hot-air balloons for Sundance Balloons. It involved figuring out how to apply the appropriate distortion so that the design looks correct when inflated; then scripting the detailing of the pattern pieces with seam allowance offsets, labels, alignment marks, and prepping for export to their cutting table software.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Recent Project



Modeling and rendering for the "Switchblade" flying motorcycle for Samson Motorworks.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Rhino Intro at Carleton U Industrial Design

On the 25th of February I'll be showing Rhino to Industrial Design students at Carleton University.