Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Noah's Loaf - Curtain Panel Goodness


This step took some tenacity...But tenacity starts with "T" which stands for Trouble!

First step is to do this with a curtain panel by pattern:


If you don't know what it is, shame on you!  Go read here:


Thank you Bob-Man and Shaggy

So with that panel pattern in my back pocket, i could go ahead and start screwing around with my base model from last time:


For what became my first attempt (thought this would be easy), I started by picking the edges between each rib and hitting the CREATE FORM button.



I did this several times to fill the whole boat


And then divided the surface and applied the appropriate Curtain Panel Pattern:


It looked okay at first blush, but upon closer inspection, the shell edges weren't squaring up right.  Actually, they looked downright sloppy:



I'd rather be accused of fastidiousness than having too much time on my hands...Semantic argument for sure....nonetheless i tried again.

This time I took the "Tedious Brute Strength" approach.  First off, i hosted a bunch of reference points along the shell profile:


And repeated this process for all 3 profiles and it worked exactly as i wanted:



Then I hosted a parameter driven rectangle  on each reference point.  CREATE FORM again and voila!



It worked as expected,


but 2 problems remained:
1) All my lengths were now curved and i wanted straight segments, broken at each joint for scheduling and measurement
2) It was a damn lot of work and i got bored

Okay...Trial #3!

Because I set up the original Curtain Panel Pattern using the correct point orientation, I realized i could do the whole shell in one shot.  The trick was going to be to use DIVIDE BY INTERSECTION in order to control the break points:







My segments divide out properly.  If i did some work with reporting parameters, I could get some cool data out of this.  Implanting MODEL LINES in the curtain panel would give me a structural stick model too!


The joints go straight through which i am not overly keen on, but i suppose if i wanted it perfect, i could take it into Rhino or ACAD and perform some additional boolean operations...



yikes....what a day....

1 comment:

  1. Just a thought about the joints going straight through. Could you use the divide by intersection and sit the reference planes either side of the ribs(or maybe just inside for a bearing). Then select the panels created inside the ribs and change them to an empty type?

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