Orient Mesh around a Line

Let's say I draw line along the x axis where it's not touching the origin. Then I construct a mesh box around the line, so the line isn't visible anymore. Now I want to rotate that line about the origin (using grasshopper) with the axis of rotation being the z-axis. You'd simply use the Rotate3D or RotateAx to accomplish this goal. But here's where I have a problem: without using a rotate component (this is important), how do I get the mesh box to follow the line where ever it goes, always covering it up?

I'm assuming orient would do the trick, but when I plug in the start and end points of the line to the A and B values, the box goes forward and uncovers the whole line, which is not what I want. How can I accomplish my goal without using rotate?

I added a grasshopper file with the problem I'm trying to fix. Thanks!

Attachments:

Box Orient.gh, 5 KB

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Hyungsoo Kim on July 28, 2016 at 12:05am

Hi.

Try this.

Attachments:

BoxOrient_re.gh, 6 KB

Permalink Reply by Ibrahim Mahmoud on July 29, 2016 at 2:07pm

Thank you so much! It works great. But now I have another problem: if I add a second rotation component and have one of the end points on the line rotate, I the box doesn't follow the line; actually it does this weird rotation thing that I can't seem to figure out why. The only thing I changed to your file was the initialization of the original line.

Attachments: