Author’s note: This is the first of what will be a weekly series of quick tips and workflows – harkening back to the early days of the Proving Ground blog that primarily feature exploratory and example content related to practical uses of computational design and BIM. We’ll start with an easy and effective one…
If you’ve worked with a 3D surface modeler like Rhino, you’ve likely encountered the need to join surfaces together that do not perfectly sharing an edge. Maybe your snaps were slightly off or perhaps a trim ‘got away from you’. Whatever the cause. you need those edges to come together. I have personally encountered this need when manually creating water-tight models use for 3D printing or certain forms of geometric analysis. Reworking a model and continuously checking the ‘naked edge’ command can be time consuming and tedious work when dealing with complex geometries.
Luckily, there is an easier solution with the LunchBox plugin for Grasshopper: we created a very simple component that exposes a “tolerance” parameter for surface join operations. Using this component, Grasshopper will join together disconnected surfaces using this tolerance value. Whether your surfaces are 1mm or 1m apart, this tolerance value can be adjusted to bring your surface edges together – and it works both in 2D and 3D applications! Download the latest LunchBox plugin to give this a try!
What now?
- Try out one of our Proving Ground Apps
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