Geometry Pipeline Upgrade Request

I absolutely love the Geometry Pipeline, mainly for its event listening capabilities. Unfortunately I still have to use a workaround to get what I want out of it.

It is super helpful to be able to use a layer mask, for instance, but not very helpful to me to get all the geometry out in one flattened list. In order to retain that information, I tend to use the geometry pipeline only as an event listener, hooked up to a boolean toggle to trigger my VB script that reads layer geometry and outputs a path structure. (See attached.)

It would be great if the geometry pipeline had some path structure options (Path by Layer? Path by Name? Layer then Name? Name then Layer? Type?) or if it had a set of outputs that gave identifying information for each object (layer, name, type), which could be used to cull/structure data downstream. I trust you would find a clever way of doing it.

Thanks,

Marc

GeometryPipeline-workaround.gh

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Marc Syp on March 15, 2012 at 3:04pm

Any thoughts on this?

Permalink Reply by Marc Syp on April 24, 2012 at 6:01pm

Bumping this to the top one more time. Sometimes I make wishes and the desire subsides and I let them fall through the cracks. Not with this one. Every time I use the pipeline component (which is often), I pine for these upgrades.

Thanks,

Marc

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on April 25, 2012 at 2:38am

Hi Marc,

didn't see this until now. Thanks for bumping again, I'll have a look, see if I can come up with something easy-to-use yet flexible.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on April 25, 2012 at 4:02am

Just added two menu items, each of which complicates the data structure by an extra dimension:

There's no way to group objects by name or layer name using wildcards, I can't really think of a UI that would allow you to modify the grouping logic.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by Marc Syp on April 25, 2012 at 10:59am

Brilliant! So I am inferring from your last comment is that there is no way to report out the associated layer name or object name in a separate output... anyway, this will work wonders for me, assuming that the layer names (and therefore paths) are ordered alphabetically. I still need to be able to correlate the data to specific layers, and as long as there's a predictable structure I can do that...

Thanks,

Marc

Permalink Reply by Marc Syp on June 5, 2012 at 4:24pm

Hi David -

I have another request for Pipeline... it would be really great if you could reference objects from within blocks without having to explode the block.

This is a workflow issue. I want to be able to grab a DWG from a colleague, pull it into rhino, and pull geometry from that block directly into GH based on layer/name/type. As of now, GH doesn't recognize the geometry until the block is exploded.

Is it possible to change this?

Thanks,

Marc

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on June 6, 2012 at 12:38am

Hi Marc,

GH is completely unaware of the existence of blocks at the moment. I imagine at some point I'll need to start supporting them, but probably not before 1.0

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by Andrew Heumann on June 6, 2012 at 1:49am

You might be interested in this little definition... as an added benefit it already creates trees by source layer.

Attachments:

Block_Exploder.gh, 11 KB

Permalink Reply by phillip on June 6, 2012 at 2:09am

This is great!

I agree, an additional string-output [e.g. (Layer, Name, IntType) ?] would be nice, if possible.

Thanks also Andrew, very useful.

Permalink Reply by Marc Syp on June 6, 2012 at 10:27am

Thanks Andrew! Great stuff and immediately useful.

Cheers,

Marc

Permalink Reply by Marc Syp on June 6, 2012 at 10:57am

The only bummer is that the listening pipeline doesn't recognize blocks at all, so any changes to blocks on the canvas need a manual refresh...

Permalink Reply by FrankS on June 6, 2012 at 1:39pm

hi guys,

i thought i link over to this sugestion regarding the pipeline component:
http://www.grasshopper3d.com/forum/topics/wish-pipeline-input-for-p...

it's about inputs for pipeline. I am interested in what you guys think about it or if you have a smart way to work with dynamic referencing of layers.

cheers,
frank