poppy petal help

[charper]

I am trying to make a 3D Rhino model of a poppy leaf. I have a bitmap image of the top, but not the side, and obviously I am trying to make a curved leaf so I cannot do an extrude straight because I am unable to maipulate the petal into a curved surface. I thought about drawing the side view myself and trying to loft the leaf...or manipulate a sphere within the top view using the bitmap then just play around with the control points to get a curved leaf but that seems to just take too long.

Am I on the right track? Is there an easier way? Easier or additional commands that I have not explored? What do you suggest for this poppy leaf which I am eventually going to boolean difference the negative and mill out of wood?

[BobWarfield]

Why not extrude the flat leaf and then use CageEdit to curl the leaf more realistically?

Here is what I came up with in a minute or so of fooling around:

http://www.thewarfields.com/cnccookb...afCageEdit.jpg

To make it, I traced a bitmap with a curve and extruded it to create a flat leaf. I then drew the two curves you see along the dimensions I wanted the leaf to curl, clicking the control points where I thought I might like to grab. Issue the "CageEdit" command with the leaf, one curve at a time, and Global region, and off you go to the races.

Does that work?

Probably lots of ways to do it in Rhino...

Best,

BW

[charper]

excellent leaf curve. I tried to do the same thing and bitmaped and extruded my poppy successfully. I tried to use the cageedit command using version Rhino 3.0 and I could not find it in the list of commands or in the index of functions. Help?

[BobWarfield]

Sorry, should have mentioned it's in Rhino 4. Download the beta copy and you too can have CageEdit.

Best,

BW

[ohno]

Just a quick thought.
If you've got the top view traced, in one of the side views create a single curve for the side profile and do curve from 2 views.
This will give you a curved version of the traced bmp. I guess you could then split that closed curve lengthways and use the 2 resulting curves to sweep 2 rails. You could use another curve... say a kind of double arc/m shape as the profile for that. It'd give you that petal with a spine look...

Ben

[charper]

One of my high schoolers helped me using Rhino 3.0
After the petal outline was bitmapped. We did a patch command (which I didn't even know existed...wonderful tool) and had enough control points in a gridded plane to curve the petal into a realistic form. I brought the petal into Mastercam, did a scallop toolpath and carved the petal into wood. Since I want to actually create a 3D petal, I am going to try to make a two piece mold.