Minimal Surface - by maximal effort ... ;)

A small guidline for a sailing trip on minmal surfaces in MoI...



A basic outline of half of a boat hull sketched freely in MoI



Exported from MoI via *.skp and imported into SketchUp



Within Sketchup a plug-in called 'Soap Skin & Bubble' was set to 50x50 resolution to generate a first auto-mesh



By default the plug-in then calculates a minimal surface connected to the intitial outline of the boat profile as if this skin was a
soap bubble



To get a bit more space within the final boat the plug-in was run again with an imaginative inner pressure set to a value of '30'

From there the was a bit tricky to get the final mesh of this minimal surface back into MoI and may vary on your own software.
In this example Sketchup exportes in Collada *.dae into Cinema 4D which exported in Wavefront *.obj into Obj23dmWireframe
wich finally converted the mesh back into MoI's *.3dm format.



Back in MoI the mesh was manually 'cleaned' to get a better view and less snap option for the 'Through points' curve tool



Any other vertical contour curve was then manually re-modeled as well as the overall contour curves based on all end points



Finally all new curves were selected and the 'Network' function then re-created the minimal surface. Mirrowed, merged and 'Full steam ahead!',
which for a sailing boat is probably the most difficult part to accomplish... ;)

Who ever knows a more elegant way to get minimal surfaces to work within MoI is very welcome to give me a note on that!

Jan