Modeling Foam

[Anonymous]

 I am trying to model foam or a spongy material with a random piping pattern similar to the photo shown above.  I've tried Voronoi sketches but that means one/two of the axes are the same throughout the structures.  Any ideas?

[TrippyLighting]

In Fusion 360 I would model this manually with a T-Spline.

For a procedural approach I would see if Blender can do it but I am fairly convinced this can be done with Houdini. 

Can you elaborate a but more on the use case for your particular project ?

Edit: Actually in both Blender and Houdini the technique is called Voronoi Fracture and there are youtube videos available that explain how to do this.

[Anonymous]

I'm trying to make a 3D cube with the foam pattern from the picture above so that I can later intersect/do some Boolean operations with the pattern and another object. In other words, I need a foam structure instead of an appearance or a surface sketch like the Voronoi fracture add on for a physical 3D model.

The piece I want to eventually print is pretty large so making T-Splines manually might not be feasible just because it would take so long. Ideally, the structure would be 100% random as well.

[SaeedHamza]

Hi,

My approach would be to create a voronoi sketch and apply pipes to it in the sculpt environment, and pipes should be created in one pipe command ( same dialog box ) so that they are attached

Might help

Regards

Saeed

[TrippyLighting]

The problem with that is that the pattern would not fill a 3 dimensional volume.

[SaeedHamza]

I feel that this is something similar to what I do when I create a building as a mass in Fusion and insert it into Revit as a conceptual mass

you see creating an opening in a mass ( especially a fluid one ) in Revit is a problem, so I use the split face command to create openings in Fusion, I hope it makes sense if your not familiar with Revit

Anyway what I'm saying is to use the split face command to project the sketch on the body in 3 dimentions, something like this :

Then use the pipe command on it to create the pattern

Might be a similar case to his ...

[TrippyLighting]

This approach to creating recursive and generative patterns is really what the Grashopper plugin in Rhino was developed for and I believe this would be fairy forward to so in Rhino.

Fusion 360 has absolutely nothing in the pipeline for this which is really very unfortunate. 

[SaeedHamza]

Ya I agree, Fusion is not functional when it comes to complicated patterns

I believe it should be in future though

[cekuhnen]

@Anonymous @SaeedHamza @TrippyLighting

This is pretty easy while labor intensive and would need a volume based cell structure.

I assume that Fusion T-Splines is not the best idea at the moment for this.

[Anonymous]

@cekuhnen

I am having the same problem as the original poster and would really appreciate if you went into more detail about what you mean by needing a "volume based cell structure." 

Do you mean that I would need some kind of scan of a physical model then import it that scan into Autodesk Fusion?

If not, can you go through the workflow you would do to CAD these structures?

Thanks so much!

[cekuhnen]

@Anonymous

What I mean is you need to build that by hand with a polygon sub-d system and it will take some time

or use a volume fracture system to create the base outline which you can pipe along!

[Anonymous]

Hello, Can you explain in details as to how to use the T-spline to make it porous?

Thanks!

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@TrippyLighting wrote:

In Fusion 360 I would model this manually with a T-Spline.

For a procedural approach I would see if Blender can do it but I am fairly convinced this can be done with Houdini. 

Can you elaborate a but more on the use case for your particular project ?

Edit: Actually in both Blender and Houdini the technique is called Voronoi Fracture and there are youtube videos available that explain how to do this.

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@TrippyLighting wrote:

In Fusion 360 I would model this manually with a T-Spline.

For a procedural approach I would see if Blender can do it but I am fairly convinced this can be done with Houdini. 

Can you elaborate a but more on the use case for your particular project ?

Edit: Actually in both Blender and Houdini the technique is called Voronoi Fracture and there are youtube videos available that explain how to do this.

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[TheCADWhisperer]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Hello, Can you explain in details as to how to use the T-spline to make it porous?

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I doubt it.

[TrippyLighting]

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@TheCADWhisperer wrote:

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@Anonymous wrote:

Hello, Can you explain in details as to how to use the T-spline to make it porous?

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I doubt it.

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Correct! I cannot explain that.