Skip to main content
Another common texturing technique uses the Orient Object block to populate a surface with the desired unit cell. This block takes in an object of any type and orients it based on a Source and Destination plane. This block becomes powerful when we take advantage of list processing. By using a list of planes as our Destination input, we can very quickly cover an entire part with multiple objects to create a textured surface.

​
Unit Cell Generation

Depending on what we want to texture our part with, there are a few ways we can generate a unit cell. 
  • Imported Geometry: Unit cells can be generated outside of nTop to use within a workflow. Both CAD and mesh bodies can be imported and used.
  • Implicits Generated within nTop: Using blocks in the Create and Modeling tab, we can generate an implicit geometry from scratch within nTop.

​
Orient Object

Once you have your unit cell, the Orient Object block will allow for populating your geometry. When setting up the block, your unit cell will be the Object input. It can be any geometry type but using a mesh type will allow for easy merging in the end.
The Source plane acts as the base for where your object will be pulled from. Here we use a Plane from Normal block with the centroid of the bounding box, accessed by the block properties. By bringing in a list of points, generated from a Random Points on Mesh block, we can place many unit cells at once. We use an Evaluate Field Gradient block to ensure that each unit cell is normal to the geometry. This trick is simple due to the fact that all Implicit bodies are fields. These geometries can then be merged with a Merge Mesh block and converted back to implicits to perform whatever boolean operations are needed for your desired texture effect; a Boolean Union to emboss or a Boolean Subtract to deboss. Here, we also use a Collapse Mesh Vertices block to avoid intersecting faces.