Anamorphosis and overlapping geometry

Hi everyone,

I am very new to grasshopper so please excuse my ignorance!

I am trying to recreate the ‘YES/NO’ anamorphosis sculpture of Marcus Raetz (using this as a simple starting point to explain my requirements). I am trying to create a script that would allow me to apply the same rules to other geometry and words.

I have the words in rhino and was hoping to merge the two in a way that the overlap between the two remained and the rest removed. I then was hoping to make the overlapping geometry stagger so that the first part of each word forms the first part of the other. In rhino I used boolean difference but I was hoping to stay in grasshopper. Please see attached for the example.

I have used solid difference and solid union and used the difference between the two to get the Y/N but I need to simplify this so that only the necessary parts are left.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

Alexandra

Attachments:

Screen Shot 2016-10-10 at 15.04.39.png, 779 KB
Screen Shot 2016-10-10 at 15.10.53.png, 524 KB
Screen Shot 2016-10-06 at 16.35.42.png, 202 KB

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Armin Seltz on October 10, 2016 at 10:29am

Hi Alexandra

Wow, talk about an ambitious first Grasshopper project! First off, you should attach the Grasshopper file, so we can work on it a bit, its kind of tedious to recreate something from a screenshot, even if its just a few components. You can right-click on the geometry inputs and click "internalise data" before you save a copy for posting here - that way you dont need to attach the Rhino file as well as the data will be contained in the 2 geometry inputs.

Ok, now to the actual task. I would love to just be able to help you easily and not start with bad news, but there is no way round it.

So all boolean operations are quite tricky for a computer. Rhino is pretty good at it most of the time, but still fails quite a lot. Grasshopper seems to be a little bit worse at it for some reason. Combining a few boolean operations is therefore quite prone to fail at some point. Also you might need slightly different boolean operations for letters with "islands" like o,g,e,a,etc.

Also if you look at the YES/NO sculpture you will see that he had to split the O in 2 parts, because of the letter count difference. The longer the words get the harder it will be to match characters to characters, because different letters have different lengths. Probably best to use a monospace font and equal length words for starters.

The good part is, that grasshopper is pretty flexible and powerful, so its definetly in the realm of possible. Attach the file and we'll see how far its possible to take it.

Permalink Reply by Alexandra Goulds on October 10, 2016 at 1:47pm

Thank you so much Armin.

I have attached the file with the internalised geometry! Hope this works.

I agree with keeping the characters the same! Makes sense to keep it simple.

Attachments:

Grasshopper 3d anamorphosis file.gh, 18 KB

Permalink Reply by Alexandra Goulds on October 11, 2016 at 12:21am

The attached above is just the Y/N this is the complete Yes/NO. However May be easier working on just Y/N?

Attachments:

grasshopper3d yes no file.gh, 26 KB

Permalink Reply by Armin Seltz on October 11, 2016 at 6:23am

Ok, so I had a little go at this. It turns out the intersection can be solved much easier with just one component, which does the solid intersection.

Also you shouldn't use that option to "only draw preview geometry for selected objects":

You should leave it off and get in the habbit of turning the visibility of things off that you dont need to see any more. Its much less confusing that way.

Also I wanted to do this problem completely in Grasshopper, so I found this little tool someone has made that lets you create text right in grasshopper and turn it into curves. Its called TxtLines by Giulio Piacentino and its found here: http://www.giuliopiacentino.com/grasshopper-tools/

So then I just created the text, extruded it by the length of the other text, capped the holes (important to turn extrusions into solids) and then use intersection again.

I kind of surprised myself by how simple it was in the end, I thought it would take much more.

So the limitations in this are as I thought for now: you cant use letters that have islands in them like O, P, etc. because they produce more than one curve. Its possible to fix those as well, but will require some work. And also the words need to have the same amount of letters. The font seems to not matter really, which is nice.

Anyways, have fun with it!

Attachments:

yes_no_working.gh, 35 KB

Permalink Reply by Alexandra Goulds on October 11, 2016 at 10:05am

Thank you so much! Will try play with this and see if I can get the curved letters to work!

I wonder if there is a way of simplifying the output into just the parts you need (for example in the W/Y cutting out the duplicates in the depth of the letters).

I have been playing with a symbol combination and have attached what I was doing just for your interest! I think I need to work out a much simpler way but I have achieved the desired model form it.

Thank you for the advice!

Attachments: