Display solid bars (instead of "thin" mesh edges)

Hi everybody,

I am studying the stresses in a very simple cable net. I need to display the results, and in order to do it properly I would like to "inflate" the edges. here my edges are too thin and I would like to see them bigger.

Is there a simple way to do it in GH (like a component "cylinder from line" that keeps the colors)?

Or in Rhino (after having baked it) ?

Thank you guys !

Tim

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on June 25, 2012 at 5:04pm

Hi Tim,

Rhino is capable of drawing curves with different widths. But Grasshopper never does this. You may need to use a VB or C# script to accomplish this if you want to draw these shapes from within Grasshopper. Would you be ok with that?

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by Anders Holden Deleuran on June 26, 2012 at 2:22am

Hi David,

This is something which I have wondered about for a while. Just to make sure that I am reading this correct. Is what you are saying, that it is possible to "bake" lines/curves with custom line weights to Rhino, but not possible to have the Grasshopper preview geometry display these custom line-weights?

In any case I assume that this would be done using Rhino.Common, any pointers as to which classes to look up here (also speaking of "geometry appearance" in general if you will)?

Thanks,

Anders

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on June 26, 2012 at 2:45am

I'm saying that if you want this in Grasshopper, you'll need to use a custom script component to do it. Like the one attached.

It's quite tricky to write these things because there's a lot of cases where you don't want the geometry to be drawn. I probably didn't handle them all, but it may serve you well enough for the time being.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Poprad, Slovakia

Attachments:

CurvesWithThickness.gh, 3 KB

Permalink Reply by Anders Holden Deleuran on June 26, 2012 at 3:14am

Very cool. Yes I can easily imagine the trickiness building up fast, looks really great though! Thanks for clearing that up David..

Permalink Reply by paul hackett on October 22, 2012 at 2:39pm

Nice, hope to see this feature in the future... Only one question, David: why this don´t work inside clusters? Is because of the different GHDocument when we close the cluster?

Permalink Reply by Andrew Heumann on June 25, 2012 at 10:38pm

Or more simply you could use the "pipe" component - this is more or less the "cylinder from line" functionality you're talking about.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on June 26, 2012 at 12:56am

That has a massive computational and memory overhead... Also, it's not the same. A pipe has a width in world units and thus it's visual width changes based on distance. When you draw lines with a specific width they always appear to be exactly the same. If you want the former than making some sort of geometry is your only option, if you want the latter then you must use special drawing calls.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Poprad, Slovakia

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