brep normals

basically, my goal is to get the closest point on a brep (from a sample point) and then get a surface normal value from whatever brep surface the closest point happens to be on.

my best guess would be to explode the brep, get all closest points from all surfaces, then find the one out of that set that's spatially closest. but this is not a very elegant solution...it's a lot of computation...and i actually haven't even succeeded in writing a working definition.

any ideas?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Danny Boyes on December 16, 2010 at 5:31am

Hi Gabriel,

There is a BRep CP component but it doesn't supply you with finer details like which surface and what UVs but you can filter this out from an Exploded Brep by looking for the shortest distance from the CP to the various surfaces and then synchronously sort the other relevant items.

Permalink Reply by gabriel on December 16, 2010 at 6:32am

cool, that's basically what i imagined...too bad the brepCP component doesn't just return uv/normal data...*Ahem*

i got the definition to work, but it's just super slow now because of how many points i'm dealing with and the complexity of the brep...and 99.5% or so of the data is unnecessary, and gets tossed out...but yeah, such is life with grasshopper...

Permalink Reply by Dedackelzucht on December 16, 2010 at 6:37am