Geodesic Dome

 From:  Michael Gibson
5173.4 In reply to 5173.3 
Hi Stefan, what does the Rhino script do, does it just apply a copy of an object to every vertex of the mesh?

If so then I think you should be able to do that in MoI too - convert the polygon mesh file to OBJ format and then use the OBJ to 3DM wireframe converter from here: http://moi3d.com/wiki/Resources#Obj23dmWireframe_converter then import the 3DM file into MoI, you will now have a bunch of lines.

Select the lines and turn on their control points, then you want to select all control points but not the lines themselves which you can do with a little trick - first do a Ctrl+A to select everything (this will select both control points and the lines too), then go to the Scene browser Types > Curves section and click on the yellow dot there to deselect the lines - this will now leave only all control points selected.

Then with all control points selected do a Ctrl+C and a Ctrl+V - this will duplicate the control points as regular point objects, and then with a bunch of point objects you can use Petr's CopyToPoints plug-in from here: http://kyticka.webzdarma.cz/3d/moi/#CopyToPoints which will allow you to replicate an object onto all those point locations.

One thing to watch out for is that you will probably have duplicated points though. If you want to avoid duplication, it might actually be easier to extract out the vertices from the OBJ file, they are all the lines that begin with a plain v, like this:

v 9.35988888 0.00000000 7.58456939
v -5.86619529 0.00000000 7.58456939
v -5.86619529 0.00000000 -7.64151478
v 9.35988888 0.00000000 -7.64151478
v 9.35988888 11.67774935 7.58456939
v -5.86619529 11.67774935 7.58456939
v -5.86619529 11.67774935 -7.64151478
v 9.35988888 11.67774935 -7.64151478

If you extract out all those lines to their own text file and then use search & replace in a text editor to strip off the v at the start, you will then have a points file that could be imported using Petr's ImportPointFile plug-in: http://kyticka.webzdarma.cz/3d/moi/#ImportPointFile

- Michael