Split Mesh

The online ShapeDiver viewer is based on WebGL, which can only render meshes of up to 65536 vertices (16 bits). For that reason, meshes coming from Grasshopper sometimes need to split before they can be used as outputs of the definition. The ShapeDiver output components take care of this operation automatically when definitions are uploaded to the platform, so it is not necessary to do it manually.

Nevertheless, we decided to expose the splitting algorithm as a utility component of the plugin, to allow for more fine-grained control of the splitting operation, and because we though it could be useful for several other use cases.

The Split Mesh component takes a mesh as input and a limit number of Faces for each mesh in the resulting list after the splitting operation. If the chosen number of Faces is bigger than the number of Faces in the input mesh, no splitting happens.

The example below splits a mesh in a target number of smaller meshes and gives each of the resulting meshes a different color: