OpenScad MetaBalls!

prusaprinters

<p>Well, it's inevitable that there will be 3D printable analogs to just about every graphics primitive/technique in existance today.</p> <p>This thing is an exploration in metaball creation using OpenScad. What's a metaball? In graphics, particularly ray-tracing, they're blobby objects. That's how you get a nice muscular rendering over a skeleton, for example.</p> <p>Although be a fairly straight forward technique, they are very computationally expensive. This implementation is the most rudimentary I could possibly come up with in 2D space. It uses a "granule" approach to the rendering. Depending on your metaball configuration, you could probably actually print one of these.</p> <p>How to use it? Right now, you can either have two balls or three balls influencing each other. I find it very hard to go with an arbitrary number of balls without having any true variables in OpenScad. it's also very hard because I can't figure out how to do loops within functions. I'd like to iterate over an array of elements, and return a sum from a function. That would be perfect.</p> <p>You can't truly appreciate how very interesting this system is unless you watch an animation of successive frames. I've included a .zip with the pictures generated from two seconds of animation. I've also included an animated .gif which I created using this site: <a href="http://www.gifninja.com/">http://www.gifninja.com/</a></p> <p>At any rate, it's about where I was when I created the first Bezier functions a few weeks back. A few iterations from now, I should have a nice isosurface library for some metaball blobby goodness.</p> <p>Definitely a work in progress, not even a 0.1 version, but I thought people might like to look at the technique.</p> <h3> Instructions</h3> <p>1) Download the .scad<br/> 2) Play with some parameters (particularly the ball placements, and radii)<br/> 3) Do some animation<br/> 4) Rejoice!</p> Category: Other