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How To Create a Voronoi Sphere in

MeshLab
7-9 minutes

Have you ever seen those amazing 3D printed voronoi structures and
wondered if you can do it yourself? In this video and blog post, I'll walk you
through how to do exactly that with just a few simple steps. We'll be taking
advantage of the many extremely powerful tools available within MeshLab -
it really makes it a breeze.

How To Create a Voronoi Sphere in MeshLab

MeshLab is an extremely powerful mesh manipulation tool with a lot of

advanced capabilities. For this tutorial, we'll be using only a few, but
hopefully it will give you an idea of the huge range of applications that this
software can have.

The first step is going to be to head over to the MeshLab website and
download and install it on your computer. Once you've done that and
opened it up, you'll be met with this user interface:
The process
In order to make a voronoi sphere, we're going to need a plain old regular
sphere mesh to start with. This can be generated right within the software
under Filters > Create New Mesh Layer > Sphere. When prompted, keep
the radius setting at 1 and set the subdivision level to 6. This ensures that
we have enough triangles in our sphere mesh to work with in the later
stages. After that, you should have a sphere plonked right in the middle of
your workspace!

As you can see, this has also opened up a panel on the right hand side of
our screen. Our current and only layer, the sphere, is highlighted in yellow.
Below that we have some display and shading options, and at the bottom
is an output window.

Now to use our first filter. A filter in MeshLab is any operation performed on
the mesh. This could be a selection of certain faces and vertices, applying
a colour to the mesh, smoothing, remeshing, resampling.. etc. There's a
lot, but I'm sure you get the idea.

The filter we're using is called Poisson-disk Sampling, and can be found
under Filters > Sampling > Poisson-disk Sampling. What this does is
create a new mesh layer, populated with a random set of points from our
initial mesh. The points are at least a minimum distance apart, ensuring
that we get a somewhat uniform distribution.

In the pop up window, you can define how many points you would like to be
created. This is essentially selecting how many cells you would like to have
in your final voronoi model. For a more dense voronoi, use more points.
For this tutorial, I'll be generating 50 sample points. Leave all the other
settings untouched, besides ticking the box for "Exact number of samples",
then click Apply and Close.

This will generate and activate a new mesh layer, and you'll be able to
vaguely see those 50 points scattered around the sphere.
Now we can use the sample points to generate a voronoi colour pattern on
the sphere mesh.

To do this, first re select your sphere layer in the right hand panel by
clicking on it. Then, go to Filters > Colour Creation and Processing >
Voronoi Vertex Colouring. Click BackDistance, then Apply and Close. This
will colour the sphere mesh according to the distance of each vertex from
the sample points we created earlier, giving us the familiar voronoi pattern
that we're after!

When MeshLab applies the colouring to the vertices in our sphere mesh, it
also applies a property to each vertex called "quality". The quality value is
directly related to the colouring - red vertices have a low quality and blue
areas have a high quality. We'll be using this fact to our advantage in order
to only select and keep the red areas.
To do this, use Filters > Selection > Select by Vertex Quality. Tick the
preview box, and drag the Max Quality slider all the way to the right. Then,
drag the Min Quality slider towards the left. How far you decide to go will
determine what kind of shape your voronoi structure will have when
complete:

When you're done with your selection, click Apply and then Close. Then,
use Filters > Selection > Delete Selected Vertices. You'll be left with
something somewhat similar to this - a jagged edged lattice structure with
no thickness to it.

Lets deal with those jagged edges first. We can do this with a smoothing
filter, found under Filters > Smoothing, Fairing and Deformation >
Laplacian Smooth. Tick the preview box and play around with the number
of smoothing steps to your liking. For this one, I decided to go with 50. You
can see that as you increase the number of smoothing steps, not only does
it smooth out those jagged edges, it also starts to round the corners
between the lattice arms.

Now that it's smooth, we can finally turn it into a manifold mesh, ready to
be printed. Yep, you guessed it, another filter. This time we're using Filters
> Remeshing, Simplification and Reconstruction > Uniform Mesh
Resampling.

As the name suggests, this filter creates a new mesh that is a resampled
version of the current one. Tick the boxes for Clean Vertices, Multi-sample
and Absolute Distance. The other two options we'll be playing with are the
Precision and Offset settings.

Precision: This setting determines how detailed our offset mesh is. A higher
value will mean fewer triangles and less detail. A lower value will create the
offset mesh with more triangles and more detail, but this comes at the
expense of a longer processing time. I usually use a value of 0.2-0.5 in the
percentage box. This gives good detail while keeping the processing time
to a reasonable 10-20 seconds.

Offset: This setting will change how thick the voronoi structure is, other
words how much it is offset from our original surface. I've found that values
of 53 to 55 in the percentage box work well.

When you're done, click apply and wait for it to process.

And there you have it! A beautiful voronoi mesh structure. If you'd like to
make it look even more organic, you can apply another laplacian smooth
filter to this offset mesh - Filters > Smoothing, Fairing and Deformation >
Laplacian Smooth.

This time when you smooth, make sure that the cotangent weighting option
is unchecked to avoid weird artifacts being created. Also keep in mind that
for every smoothing step you do, more material is removed from the mesh
every time. If you want a really smooth look without your voronoi structure
becoming really thin, you can compensate for this by bumping up the offset
value in the earlier Uniform Mesh Resampling step. In the image above, I
used 80 smoothing steps.

Going Further
So that's the complete process for creating a voronoi sphere in MeshLab!
To export it, simply make sure the offset mesh layer is selected and use
File > Export Mesh As. Then you can slice it and print.

If you've stumbled across this guide however, the chances are that you're
probably wanting to apply this effect to a specific model of choice. If that's
the case, you're in luck! The steps outlined above can be applied to any
mesh (STL file) of your choosing. At the beginning, instead of generating
the sphere, you can use File > Import Mesh.

Coming soon, I will show you how to make a voronoi version of any model
while also retaining specific areas of detail that may be needed for
functionality - for example a drawer handle which still needs a socket for a
screw to go through. If that's something that interests you, stay tuned for
that! I'll see you in the next one.