Supported Rhino Models

Analysis on Meshes in Rhino

If a mesh is good enough, the Rhino command "MeshToNURB" may be used to convert the mesh into a valid boundary representation of a solid. The mesh polygons become legitimate faces of the solid, and Scan&Solve may be used to perform stress analysis as with any other valid boundary representation. However, for this to work, the mesh must satisfy several fairly technical conditions, including:

1. Every edge in the mesh must be shared by exactly two polygons or triangles.
2. Every vertex has a single "ring" of faces around it.
3. Mesh faces cannot intersect each other, except at the edges and vertices.
4. Mesh faces (polygons) must be consistently oriented (with normal pointing continuously in the same direction).

These conditions may be verified and corrected using the Mesh Repair and Mesh Edit tools in Rhino. In addition, currently Rhino restricts the MeshToNURB command to meshes with fewer than 20,000 faces.

A brief video demonstrating Scan&Solve analysis from meshes may be viewed here.