How do you divide a surface into a grid of smaller surfaces?

I am trying to divide a roof surface into a grid of 4' by 2' rectangles. So far I have only been able to divide the surface into a grid of points but haven't been able to figure out how to create individual surfaces out of them.

This is the geometry I am trying to divide.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Michael Pryor on July 26, 2011 at 2:35pm

use the isotrim (subsurface) component

Permalink Reply by Aaron on July 26, 2011 at 2:48pm

To simply divide a surface into smaller surfaces, you can use IsoTrim (image below). To get them to be constrained to 4'x2' dimensions requires your surface to be a factor of 2' in one direction and 4' in another (I assume). You can probably get really close by messing with the UV values. Hope this helps.

Permalink Reply by Andrew Heumann on July 26, 2011 at 7:07pm

When you're dealing with trimmed surfaces like this, things can be a bit more complicated. Using the isotrim component as the others suggest will give you rectangles that lie outside of the boundary of your roof. In order to avoid this I would calculate the surface isocurves at the appropriate spacing and then use these to split the surface.

As Aaron suggests, you could get close to this 4'x2' dimension by dividing the UV dimensions of the surface. For more accuracy, assuming the surface is planar, you could generate the splitting curves another way, directly offsetting them by the required dimensions. The attached definition shows both strategies.

Hope that helps!

P.S. I think this makes you the third LWHS student on the Grasshopper board! I had no idea you went on to study architecture. How are things?

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