Box morphing (Morph boxing?)

Good morning everyone,

I've an unusual task for grasshopper that's thrown up a couple of problems. I'm trying to morph a complex piece of pre-defined geometry onto a surface by dividing it into a series of reference boxes and using the Box Morph component.

So far I've had some success, as shown in the image. However a few things have cropped up (probably not helped by my limited GH skills!)

1- The morphed geometry isn't aligned. I have ensured the original points match point for point; I have a feeling the u&v directions might have swapped?

2- So far I have been splitting the complex geometry manually in Rhino and defining manually in GH, then matching reference box to target box one by one. This was more for the sake of expedience, and to see if it worked; however I feel there must be a better way of doing this. Maybe the reference boxes split the complex geometry, then test for any contained geometry (the 'Inside' component?)

3- I feel there might be a better (existing!) solution somewhere, as I can't be the first person to try this!

I've attached an image of what I'm trying to do + the definition. The .3dm file is 12MB, I can send it upon request :D

All help would be much appreciated, thanks

Attachments:

Match Boundary box.jpg, 75 KB
Uneven Bounding boxes.gh, 38 KB

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Michael Pryor on April 12, 2013 at 11:04pm

rhino file?

Permalink Reply by Oliver Jones on April 13, 2013 at 1:50am

It's too large to post here, here's a link to it in my dropbox:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/79857581/complex%20map.3dm

Permalink Reply by Oliver Jones on April 13, 2013 at 8:10am

The definition now sorts the geometry to each containing box and dispatches it correctly, the only issue remaining is the orientation of the morphed objects. Changing the twisted box point order doesn't seem to affect it, can anyone give me any pointers?

Attachments:

Morph box.jpg, 66 KB
Uneven Bounding boxes.gh, 41 KB

Permalink Reply by Michael Pryor on April 13, 2013 at 8:19am

No need here for twisted box. Surface box will probably clear it up. http://formularch.blogspot.com/2012/03/gh-box-morph.html?m=1

Permalink Reply by Oliver Jones on April 13, 2013 at 9:31am

I originally had a surface morph but it wouldn't orient, someone somewhere suggested a correctly wired twisted box would do the trick but sadly not :(

I've tried several methods now (creating a sweep surface with straight lines and applying the same surface box modifier, taking the face of a bounding box to produce the grid) and the orientation is always off. I think it's to do with the boxes UVWs, could this be correct and if so how would I swap these around?

Permalink Reply by Oliver Jones on April 13, 2013 at 12:38pm

Solved!

In the end , all I had to do was to lie the original geometry down so the reference boxes lie in the XY plane, I can only assume this is to do with the box morph component? Anyway, happy with the results