Use this tool to carve a solid pattern in your model. The tool creates a set of solid "primitives", and then either performs a Boolean difference or intersection operation with the input solid.
How Does it Work?
Like the Make Solid Tool tool, this tool operates on a grid representation of the surface. Internally it constructs a voxel version of the object and a voxel version of the chosen primitives. The tool then performs the Boolean operation on the grid, then extracts a surface mesh. See the Make Solid topic for more details.
Parameters
- Pattern types: You can create a number of different primitives to combine with the input solid.
- Edges: Creates cylinders around the mesh edges
- Dual Edges: Creates virtual edges between centers of neighboring triangles, and creates cylinders around those edges.
- Mesh + Delaunay Edges: Constructs a Delaunay tetrahedral mesh, then creates a network both surface mesh edges and tetrahedral mesh edges. It then constructs cylinders around all edges in the network.
- Mesh + Delaunay Dual Edges: Constructs edges between centers of neighboring triangles, and between centers of neighboring tetrahedra, then construct cylinders around each of these edges.
- Tiled Tubes: A set of infinite cylinders oriented in one direction, each with a radius.
- Tiled Spheres: A set of spheres.
- Lattice: A cubic lattice of cylinders.
- Random Primitives (Volume): A set of spheres randomly placed throughout the volume of the model.
- Random Primitives (Surface): A set of spheres randomly placed on the surface of the model.
- FaceGroup Borders: Creates cylinders around edges along borders between different face groups.
- Tiling mode: For tiled patterns you can choose between a regular grid or hex grid:
Regular Grid (left) and Hex Grid (right)
- Composition Mode
- Subtract: Keep the parts of the model that are not inside the pattern volumes.
- Intersect: Keep only the parts of the model that are also inside the pattern volumes.
- Clip to Surface: Clip the resulting patterned model flat against the input surface. Here's an example. We've generated a pattern using the Edge pattern type (center image), which creates cylinders around each mesh edge. In the last image, we've enabled Clip to Surface so that the resulting pattern does not "bulge" outside of the original input.
- Grid Smoothing: Performs the specified number of iterations of smoothing on the grid representation of the primitives. The overall effect of this smoothing is generally an "erosion" of the primitive shapes.
In this example, we are performing an intersection with a sphere model and a lattice primitive. The three models show progressively more grid smoothing: 1, 2, and 3 iterations of smoothing. Note how the lattice shape is eroded more with each iteration.
- Grid Resolution, Mesh Resolution: Setting a higher value for these parameters results in better quality results, at the expense of more computation and memory cost.
- Reduce: This operation can produce a very high-resolution triangle mesh, so we auto-reduce the mesh when it finishes. Use this slider to set a target percentage of triangles to keep.
- Gradient: These modes vary the size/radius of the pattern volumes through space.