Bicubic Surfaces

And finally, the kitchen sink!

After a whole bunch of the basic primitives, if you consider the SuperShape/Formula a “basic”, I have come to the bicubic surfaces.  I originally wrote the code for this in OpenScad.  Translating it over to work in FabuCad was pretty simple, and largely involves eliminating code, and merging things back together.

If you look at the example, it’s pretty straight forward to use.  In this particular case, I’m using the Bezier basis by default.  You could just as easily substitute the Catmull-Rom or the Hermite (they’re both built in).  It’s not quite splines or nurbs, but those will come along soon enough.  The intention here is that you can pretty easily create and play with all sorts of forms of things, and quickly see them rendered and print out samples on your 3D printer.

This is reasonably fast code.  In the picture, there are 16 of these bezier surfaces, and the rendering time is a matter of seconds, not minutes or hours.  And of course creating the .stl from there is just a menu click away.

…and even if you do 100 of them,  with a facet count of 1600 apiece, it still only takes about 20 seconds to render.

Well, that’s it.

Enough functions for phase I of this thing.  I guess it’s time to write up some documentation and actually release it.

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