contour or shell gives uneven result

[STERNontwerp]

As can be seen in the file, the contour or shell node has an error. The endresult should be evenly divided.

For now I solved it by manually moving the parts to the right place, but that isn't an ideal solution. It seems to be a Marionette error.

Ernst van der Vecht

[the frog]

hello

I worked on your script to try to find a solution

The first part of the script misses the beginning point so I took the info from your object.

Than (I don’t know if this is what you want) instead of having a distance I gave a number of cuts; in my try I could not divide 5000/150= 33,33333 so nothing was centered. it was difficult to see what was wrong.

From this I cut your script after “contour” to see how it worked. In this case the nurbs are placed correctly. I checked the nurbs directions they are all alike.

The bizarre part comes later when you shell. I drew some lines to see how the shell went and you can see some are going left and some are going right, but they stick to the given distance.

I can’t find a reason so lets hope someone understands…

[STERNontwerp]

hello frog,

Yes, the problem seems to be the 'shell' mode. The problem is not dependable on the beginning point or the delta. But it is easier to see with a thickness of f.i. 100.

I get left/right: lrrrrlrrlllrlrllrllr, it seems random but reproducable. I don't know python, so I can't look into the shell node.

Ernst

[Marissa Farrell]

Oooooh this is very irritating.

So, this is happening because the function used in the shell node takes the normal of the NURBS object that it's going to shell.. I'm not sure why, but it appears that when a NURBS curve is converted to a NURBS surface, it doesn't reliably have the normal in the same direction.

I'll see if I can figure out a way to at least get them all to shell in the same direction.

[Marissa Farrell]

Okay. So as a workaround, it now shells in each direction by half of the distance.

This is an inadequate final fix, I'll probably throw in an OIP control to let you decide in which direction the shelling takes place, but at least for now, it makes this uniform.

(Figure if someone's shelling a bowl shape or something of the sort, you wouldn't want to shell in both directions, but maybe offering the choice would be a positive improvement?)

Edited March 11, 2016 by MarissaF

[STERNontwerp]

Sorry for the irritation, but are you sure it's fixed. Doesn't work here. Although I see the '#Revised by MFarrell 03/11/16' in the Shell node, nothing seems to have changed.

[Marissa Farrell]

Oh how weird.

Something is going wrong with the AddSolid command. it actually doesn't add them...

If you take that line out and replace the self.Params.shell.value with "Shell1" and run it, you'll see that it was fixed there... but when you add the resulting solids together half gets deleted...

Sorry!

I'll keep poking.

[Marissa Farrell]

Let's try this one!

Edited March 11, 2016 by MarissaF

[STERNontwerp]

Yep, that's it.

[the frog]

Nice Marissa!

Could you explain why, if you divide by 2 and convert into solid they all go in the same direction. I am totally in the fog.

Maybe I should do the same with my picture frame to see if the path extrude node is not converting the result into invisibility…

[Marissa Farrell]

So what I did here was divide the shell thickness by two, and then shelled each contour twice - once in each direction (positive half-thickness, and negative half-thickness) This in a sense will center where the shell is created on the contour.

I converted them to a solid because when they were shells, I wasn't able to add the two halves together to create just one object, that's probably just something funny with how the Add Solid command works with shell objects.

Does all of this make sense, or should I try to explain it differently?

[the frog]

lot of sense

I’ll have to change my glasses, I didn’t see the – sign in shell2

I will try to convert into solid in the path extrude node in case this is the pb

[STERNontwerp]

deconstruct - reconstruct

Now I'm trying something else using the contour node: get a 3D object, deconstruct using 'contour' and reconstruct using the contours in a 'loft surface' node. (Some loss of information is to be expected. Later on I hope to use this to distort an object.)

But something strange is happening which might shed some light on the 'shell' node going the wrong way. The first countour is off. This wrong result is not dependant on the 3D-object, nor on the input in the 'contour' node (delta/point/dir)...

See the attachment

[Marissa Farrell]

This is due to the following line in the Contour Node:

If you uncomment this line (remove the "#", have it look how it does in the image above) then the reconstruction should be correct.

It appears that we had that in the script at one point, but someone may have commented it out in a later revision. I'm not sure when or why that was done, but this should be the fix. It's on my list to fix in the default content!

Hope this helps!

Marissa

Edited April 21, 2016 by MarissaF

[AlanW]

Hi,

Not sure if this is what you are after?

Edited April 21, 2016 by Alan Woodwell

[STERNontwerp]

Thanks Marissa, this works fine.

Thanks Alan for thinking with me, but that is not what I was after. I wanted to distort a volume and fill the surface of a volume with brush strokes, so that I could walk through a Van Gogh. That's out of my league, so I thought I could try a pointilistic picture first.

DomC's solution only works for top surfaces and I can't program in Python to see if I could improve on that, so I had to find another solution.

While I was waiting for an answer to my question, I realised that I didn't need the volume itself and I used the contours to fill the surface, making a 'pointcloud from volume', see attachment.

Next thing is: how to distort the contours to make it look more like a handdrawn thing. I think I can manage that.

I think it would be better if I didn't use spheres, but symbols (pebbles). But what I can't find out is how to query the direction of a certain point of a contour or volume. I would appreciate some help with that.

Please be carefull. There are about 10.000 spheres drawn by the wrapper, which maximises my 8Gb and sometimes crashes. The 'main distance'-node can be put on 200 for a first try.

[AlanW]

Check with Dom as he has a CW node that gives the direction of the Normal but not near a computer for a few days.

Edited April 22, 2016 by Alan Woodwell