Image map from grasshopper

Hi Everyone,

i'm a newbie here. Here's a task.

Basically, I have a surface and with a help of grasshopper I'm creating a bunch of circles. See the picture:

Is it possible to cut holes in the surface with the circles and then somehow bake resulting surface (with holes in it) into a black and white image? (Basically, I'm trying to get an Alpha (transparency) map for initial surface, so I can export surface(without holes in it) and then apply my Alpha map to emulate holes in it)

Thank you for your help.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on August 5, 2017 at 12:27pm

There's nothing in vanilla Grasshopper for drawing images, although various files have been uploaded in the past which contained C# or VB components that generate images. I believe some plugins (FireFly?) have support for bitmap data types, but I do not know to what degree they can help you actually make new images.

Using a custom script component sounds like the most sensible approach. If you cannot find one in the discussion history I can try and write another one.

Permalink Reply by Igor Kozyrev on August 5, 2017 at 3:21pm

Thank you for the reply, David.

I found example of C# code for exporting vertex color into image file. I'll look into FireFly also.

I'm still trying to figure out how to cut holes in the surface with generated circles (without baking everything and then doing it in Rhino). Any recommendation for that task?

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on August 5, 2017 at 3:51pm

[Surface Split] component should work provided your circles are on the surface. I don't know how it behaves if the curves are merely near the surface. This will also give you the little surfaces inside the holes though, so you'll probably have to sort your resulting surfaces by area and pick the biggest one.

But you're right that a texture would be far more efficient than cutting lots of little holes.

Permalink Reply by Igor Kozyrev on August 7, 2017 at 8:37am

Thank you. Surface split and Sort List worked for me. Appreciate your help,David.

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