Mathieu Glachant’s Magnificent Membranes
Model creator: http://www.thingiverse.com/syvwlch
Mathieu Glachant’s recent creations on Thingiverse have been a dizzying introduction to a deeply neat tool called TopMod. Simply speaking, TopMod is a topology manipulator. Rather than treating the model under consideration as a collection of vertices, edges, and faces, TopMod at its core is processing the topology of the mesh.
First experimenting with the capabilities of TopMod, Mathieu created a collection of beautiful mathematical structures, illustrating how incredibly complex a shape TopMod could quickly produce while still preserving its solidity. From there, he illustrated how TopMod could be put to more practical use, designing a test mug for the RepRap that you’d actually need a 3D printer to make.
Designers like him not only give Thingiverse new richness in models, but in tools. His tutorial on TopMod is enough to get started folding up complex shapes, and it’ll be really exciting to see what others can do with this tool, as well as what Mathieu comes up with next!
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Dave Said,
April 16, 2009 @ 5:53 am
I’m glad to see you guys are using TopMod at thingiverse. I was the lead developer of the “new” version while I was working on my Master’s degree at Texas A&M in 2007.
Let me know if you know any C++ / Qt / OpenGL programmers out there who are interested in helping out with the new version. I haven’t had any time to work on it since I started having a real job, and I’d really like to redo the whole thing from scratch so it doesn’t crash so often. Thanks for your help,
Dave Morris
Syvwlch Said,
April 16, 2009 @ 6:58 am
Aw, shucks, guys!
Syvwlch Said,
April 17, 2009 @ 5:37 am
Hi Dave,
It doesn’t crash all that often, provided one puts the render in wireframe mode before certain operations. At least that’s been my experience.
Thanks for the software, in any case!