3D Voronoi

[hajamull]

I can't find out how to make a 3D voronoi or somthing similar with Wings 3D 2.01 mlab. The tools with Voronoi in their names seems to be working best on the surface of objects. The closest thing I get so far is the Monodisperse foam tool. If I use Inset and intrude on the whole object i get a kind of 3D voronoi skeleton, the edges on the outer surfaces are fine, but on the inside the edges have some sort of double geometry that gets more obvious when you try to smooth the object.
The approach i Grasshopper i somewhat different:
"Take a random cloud of points
generate the 3d voronoi
scale the edges of the cells towards their centres, and also towards the centres of the faces.
connect these 2 sets of scaled edges with mesh quads and join
cull some of the outer faces
subdivide and smooth"
Can I do something like this in Wings 3D or maybe another more "Wingsy" way. After all Grasshopper is node-based and Wings is not. I tried to attach an image that shows the effect I'm after. I don't know if it shows in the message.

Best regards

[ggaliens]

Voronoi tricks is one of the driving forces behind MLAB. MLAB makes very little attempt to create a soup-to-nust voronoi "workflow". Rather it gives you lots of atomic functions/features/tricks so that you can create you own Voronoi workflows.

This picture you show is for sure possible in MLAB. I do it all the time. I might even have the youtube video to show you how to do it.

The process has 10 - 15 steps (commands issued) that must be followed very very carefully. Yo may need to look for mistakes after any given step.

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As a step to learn the right commands ... you can try this with any old super regular foam bulk.

A degenerate case would be 27 cubes (separate) assmbled into a 3 x 3 x 3 bulk. If you can create command to make PIPES for all this ... then you can also do it for monodisperse foam ... or even a larger foam bulk that is not to crazy. The problem comes when you have a shared edge(s). We call those coincident edges ... which is extremely short ... and also hidden in the bulk. This will BREAK the ability of inset to perform well. Unless you make of use an inset that does not inset a constant distance. One of those insets might be laying around.

You can also SKYPE with me for more ideas if you want.

[ggaliens]

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Just FYI ... I did re-do some of these steps to get it right and make sure the vertices were SNAPPED so that weld would happen correctly. It took some musings and some playing.

[ggaliens]

Made a new command for helping to keep pipe shape by adding directed controls and specific loops for pipes in the bulk. You can't always create a nice criterial to find the pipe edges. Depends on the type of foam. This new command should work well on most foams.

[hajamull]

Thank you, this looks promising! How do i get this plugin into Wings? Do I Have to wait for the next release of Wings 3D mlab?

[ggaliens]

Yes. You would need to wait. If I happen to "Pre-release" a video of an upcoming feature ... I usually try to make a release within say an hour. But I have to perform a global re-test of a lot of things in MLAB. More than likely a release by next weekend if not sooner.

Dgud edit: I removed a lot of crap/spam in the end of this post, either your account have been hacked or this forum is in really bad shape.

[ggaliens]

I did make a release with the new command. Also have a non-linear slicing capability for fabricator type people.

[ggaliens]

Been working like crazy on this open foam stuff. It is a slow slog. But it is good for you ... like trail running or lifting some weights.

[hajamull]

Hi again!
It seems you have put a lot of work into this, thank you! "I did make a release with the new command" Is that in the 2.0.0.2017-03-14 release. In that case where do I find the command and what did you call it?

By the way I recently discovered the Lattice by extrusion command, and that does about exactly what I was after. Exept it does not weld the tidbits so I have to do that afterwards (after some trial and error to find the right distance tolerance) So if I make a cube, then upscale it to about twice the size, then run the Monodisperse Foam Filler, then use the Lattice by Extrusion, then weld and then smooth, I get perfectly smooth pipes and joints. That is on the inside of the object, the outer pipes seems to be half and does not join so nicely. Before smoothing the pipes have a hexagonal shape. How do I get that on the outside?

One other thing: This Works With foam. Foam is slightly irregular (like foam in nature) and thats nice, but I would also like to do the same thing With stacks of space-filling polyhedra like the truncated octahedron and the elongated dodecahedron. These are not among the standard primitives in Wings 3D. It would be nice to chose a primitve, type in the number of rows, columns and stacks and turn it in to a lattice in just a few steps.
And then finally: The gyroid skeleton would make a nice lattice. Is there a smart way to make that in Wings 3D? Tutorials on how to make the Gyroid is often quite complicated. The Gyroid Skelton could be made by simply extruding a polygon along a path following some relatively simple rules

[ggaliens]

I have some space filling routines like 4x4x4 or NxNxN placement. In theory ... if you know the basic metrics of you space fillers which you can determine experimentally to any accuracy you want, you can then interleave your primitives with MLABS arrangement items.

I try hard not to get into super-high level macros unless someone is going to donate to effort or something like that. Instead ... I like making lower level functions ... but still function not found in core Wings3D.

For complicated items like Gyroid ... get primatives from SurfaceEvolver or somwhere else.

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The new command is "Parallel edge rings". You can track stuff like this down with keywords if you use MLABs help system.