Mesh Attributes - What are they good for?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Mateusz Zwierzycki on October 18, 2016 at 2:44am

Hm... are you sure mesh attributes are accessible with any of the native components ? I think you might be asking about some components from one of the plugins (probably Human), where object attributes relate to all of the Rhino document object attributes (layer id, group id etc.)

Permalink Reply by David Stasiuk on October 18, 2016 at 4:07am

They're not native...they're part of MeshEdit. I think they're also not well-named, in that they aren't object attributes really: they just expose user strings for meshes. You can load up a mesh with custom data lists and then retrieve them later (AddAttribute and ExtractAttribute). They also use a non-ZUI means to add parameters.

Ethan, I think these are most useful if you plan on baking a mesh, but want it to keep some kind of additional information associated with it for later use. For example, if you performed a finite element analysis on a mesh and wanted to capture a bunch of different data associated with the results for parsing in a later definition (translation/rotation vectors, forces, etc)...you can just attach any number of data to the mesh, bake it, and then retrieve those values another time. You can also do it right within the same definition where you assign the data, but it seems to me an extra step to do so, since the data in question is already in the def.

Permalink Reply by Ethan Gross on October 18, 2016 at 4:33am

Mateusz and David, I guess I should have expressed myself better, like by saying what I actually meant...which was, just using components, with no scripting. I was thinking about cellular automata and naively imagined that mesh attributes might be a way of tracking the states, for example by associating booleans and faces. What seems to happen though is that once I assign the boolean values and then extract them to recalculate the states they're then gone from the original mesh. Obviously, I'm not clear on how to use them. Please let me know if my CA approach makes any sense at all or, I'm open to any other suggestions. Thanks.