Curve subdivision by chord height

I'd like to subdivide a curve into segments with equal chord heights. I know I can divide into equal chord lengths with the Divide Distance tool, but I can't find a height option.

I've written some really dirty code that does it here. Don't judge me, it's inelegant and inefficient, but it does the job.

What I'd really like to hear is that there's no point in going on to make something like a binary search because there's already a feature that does it, but failing that, does anyone have any suggestions on how to do it in a more efficient way?

Attachments:

chord height division.3dm, 28 KB
chord height division.gh, 5 KB

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on April 11, 2013 at 4:46am

Is it just equal heights or is it division for a specific height? The latter would be easier as you can take it one segment at a time.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by Ben Doherty on April 11, 2013 at 4:49am

For the moment just a single/list of chord heights would do. I suppose people might like to find a way to make it fit their curve exactly, but I'm not overly fussed about that.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on April 11, 2013 at 6:31am

I'm trying to get this done using Curve Deviation SDK functions but it's taking for frikkin' ever. If I do get something that actually works and completes in under a minute for an average curve I'll let you know...

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by Ben Doherty on April 13, 2013 at 1:17am

I asked on stack overflow here:http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15941728/divide-curve-by-chord-h...

And got a pretty hardcore answer that's going me some time to unpack, but if is of any help to you...

Permalink Reply by Tobias Schwinn on April 11, 2013 at 11:14am

Hi Ben,

not sure if this helps, and probably you've found this out already, but if you wanted to just control the maximum chord height there is a built-in method ToPolyline, which is part of the Curve class. The tolerance attribute will control the maximum deviation from the input curve which corresponds to the chord height. So you could do something like this:

Dim _poly As PolylineCurve = C.ToPolyline(0, 1, 0, 0, 0, t, 0, 0, True)

where t is your tolerance value.

Best,

Tobias

Permalink Reply by Ben Doherty on April 16, 2013 at 12:38am

Thanks Tobias, I hadn't found that. I'll have to play with it some more to see if I can get more control over it, but at the moment I can't see a way to get a precise chord height. That said, if you just want more subdivisions in curvy bits then it is great; much faster and simpler!