VRay Scatter 2.5 - Glass Roof Structure.

[jonahhawk]

It's hard to get panels to butt together nicely. It would be sweet if it would distort each panel(proxy) using the surface normals; much like Paracloud GEM, or other paneling apps.

I've wanted to script something like this;create a reference of a given panel with an FFD Box mod. align each corner of the FFD to each corner of each quad of an EPoly. then use the vertex normal to deform the FFD.

[glorybound]

Revit 2010

Revit 2010 has something that might help. The cover of the new CD shows a glass roof structure and I saw a demo of how they did it.

[Da_elf]

vray scatter? for a glass roof?

[jonahhawk]

You could not make construction docs from it

Ack! Not Revit! Anything but Revit! But yes, Revit seems to have some nice panelling tools...

Paracloud GEM is the pretty simple to use; a better design tool for panel structures I think. But Revit has the obvious advantage of BIM and all that construction doc capabilities... the difference between art and science I suppose.

[rmejia]

This guy has some good tips on this sort of paneling stuff, but it's for Revit:
http://buildz.blogspot.com/2009/05/seamless-panels.html

This other blog has a couple of different programs, there might be a tutorial for doing paneling in Max:
http://designreform.net/?s=panels&image.x=0&image.y=0

[Da_elf]

looks like something that could have been poly modeled easily though

[jonahhawk]

sure, I could model it. It would take forever and I would be stuck with a single design. It would be pretty hard to make the design process this dynamic and fast. Vray Scatter makes it easy to explore ten different overall roof forms quickly, with lots of detail.

The underlying geometry is a simple epoly subD with 9 verts. I can quickly deform that shape and all of the glass panels scale and reposition accordingly.

[jonahhawk]

um. I stand corrected. The Surface Deform world space mod. does exactly what i'm looking for and does it much better (though less efficiently RAM wise) than VRay Scatter.

[re:FORM]

Do you have this working in max or it just a wish?
Funny you brought this up as I've been developing a plugin to do this kind of paneling distribution.

[re:FORM]

Here's a quick example of the result. The base object has been distributed on to a simple sphere. Tops and bottoms of the sphere are ignored as you cannot map objects onto triangular polygons.

[sjmoir]

um. I stand corrected. The Surface Deform world space mod. does exactly what i'm looking for and does it much better (though less efficiently RAM wise) than VRay Scatter.

Surface Deform is great;

http://simonmoir.blogspot.com/2008/07/birds-nest.html

[muoto]

but not very precise

[re:FORM]

Here's a couple more examples... note the 'precise' alignment of panel edges allowing for precision placement over a freeform surface. If you model the panels accurately, the resultant mesh can be welded and mesh-smoothed to produce interesting results.

In this example a simple glass and frame geometry has been conformed, using my plugin, to a 30x10 resolution plane which has a bend and wave modifier added to provide curvature.

My aim is to have a plugin that allows you to apply a collection of panels to a surface distributed by mat-ID, map or randomly; to allow highly complex cladding/roofing designs.

/Edit... Final example added that shows a structure with edges welded to allow turbosmooth of entire structure. Highly complex multy-curved panelled cladding systems can be easily developed fairly easily with this

[sjmoir]

That looks great Patrick. You could use that for all sorts of things, modular facades conformed to block models for context buildings etc.
Muoto, you're a lucky man if you get to deal with accuracy, I get to deal with Architects though! Got to leave something for the engineering consultants to do

[muoto]

That looks great Patrick. You could use that for all sorts of things, modular facades conformed to block models for context buildings etc.
Muoto, you're a lucky man if you get to deal with accuracy, I get to deal with Architects though! Got to leave something for the engineering consultants to do

héhé...yeah i know...i am an architect
But i try to get as precise as i can be, its not easy to trust engineers