Letter Perforation on curved surface

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Permalink Reply by Brian Harms on May 4, 2017 at 12:13pm

What have you tried so far? 

I would try projecting these curves onto the surface first, or extruding them in the direction you want, and use the intersect command on the extruded letters and the surface.

Then you have the text on the surface.

Then you can use the split command in rhino. 

Since these curves are just floating in the air it's not clear how you want them projected/mapped onto the surface.

Once you understand the steps you would take in rhino, it makes it easier to understand the steps in GH (or at least will give you the names of the commands to use in a search on this site).

Permalink Reply by Brian Harms on May 4, 2017 at 2:26pm

Hi Yunus,

Thanks for uploading the GH file. Unfortunately it seems to crash my computer before opening :)

What is the ultimate goal for this surface? Are you going to render it? Fabricate it? etc.

Depending on your end goal you may be able to find an alternative to your problem.

In general, cutting hundreds or thousands of profiles from a single nurbs surface can take a while/bog down/crash rhino or grasshopper in general (at least in my experience). 

One issue I see if some of your curves self intersect (it give you a warning before you try to extrude them). This is problematic when you go to trim/split/project or whatever. One solution is to rebuild your curves, but you'd need a sufficient number of control points, which makes your curves even more complex and you'd lose some resolution. 

But let me know what your ultimate goal is for this thing and maybe we can think of something simpler.

Permalink Reply by Brian Harms on May 4, 2017 at 6:10pm

Hi Yunus, 

Gotcha. So my thought is that since you are interested in rendering, you might not need to make physical cuts in your surface to achieve what you want in the renderer. 

I might consider looking into using a high resolution image of your text as a texture applied to your surface. Specifically as an opacity map. So if you had a white image with black text applied as an opacity map to your surface, where black will be transparent, then (I believe) you could still have light rays pass through these negative spaces. Then you can edit your image however you want to make adjustments like text size and such.

Best,

Brian