Food4Rhino

As of now Condor is work in progress and in this stage we are looking for feedback on what features might be useful to implement in this context.

Condor is a university project aimed at minimizing the waste of scrap material. Condor is an application that is able to retrieve the contours of a scrap material and load them into Rhino. The user can then virtually pack the design on the scrap material to see if the design fits the scrap material. The hope is that this plugin will make it easier to reuse scrap materials, by enabling the user to virtually pack the materials, ensuring that the design will fit the scrap material.

Limitations:
Origin: In the current version Condor will try to align the material to the axes. This will only work properly for materials that have a rectangular outer shape (i.e. holes inside does not matter). We are looking for solutions to avoid this limitation.

Features:

• Find the contours of a scrap material 
• Export the contours to Rhino3d
• Use Homography to transform the perspective of the image to be directly on top of the image (requires a reference object such as a blank white paper next to the scrap material)
• Basic and advanced mode (Basic mode uses basic operations to find the contours while the advanced mode the user can configure the actions taken to find the contours)
• Automatic cropping of the image

Known Issues:

• Condor likes to hide behind rhino after condor first has been hidden, this is only a problem when selecting Condor from the taskbar, but doesn't happen when directly clicking on the Condor app
• The webcam feature on Mac is not supported

Instructions:

1. Load an image from file or capture an image with webcam
   1. Make sure that the background of the image is very black, as shown on the photos
2. See if the basic settings will be able to find the contours of the object
   1. If the Basic options aren't enough to to find the contours of the object use the advanced tab
      1. The goal is to have a clear boundary between the object and the background.
      2. If Actions such as blurring and boundary enhancement helps defining a clearer boundary between the object and background
      3. Right-clicking any action will reveal the options for the given actions, adjusting these settings can help getting a better boundary
      4. If you haven't had any luck it is possible to manually select where the object is on the image using the "Object selection" action
3. Once the desired contours are found, insert the dimensions of the object, to get a proper scale in Rhino
4. Press Export to export the contours to Rhino

Feedback:
We would like to get any feedback on any ideas that can make Condor more useful for your personal situation. We would also appreciate any pictures of objects that you have taken, both those that works, and especially those that does not work.

If you have any questions or comments please feel free to send us a mail at condor4rhino@gmail.com