Request: Tag output inside of GH

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Danny Boyes on August 11, 2009 at 9:47am

Please would you elaborate on what specifically tag outputs would be like. As if I'm guessing right the facility is already present with the panel component. see below:

Permalink Reply by Luke Semo on August 11, 2009 at 11:57am

By tags I meant text dots/oriented tags as supported object types inside of GH, where now they are excluded.

Attachments:

• tag_no_output.jpg, 23 KB

Permalink Reply by Danny Boyes on August 12, 2009 at 2:23am

I see... out of interest what would you do with the output from a tag?

Permalink Reply by Fabiano Friedrich on August 12, 2009 at 4:25am

This would be very useful, specially if you are breaking a surfaces into panels and need to extract the edges/vertices to excel and need to keep track of the panel numbers.

Permalink Reply by Luke Semo on August 12, 2009 at 7:25am

Exactly. It would help immensely with model-to-fabrication scenarios, unfolding scripts, tabbing scripts, etc, to help keep track of joints and connections.

Permalink Reply by Damien Alomar on August 12, 2009 at 9:06am

But what information would a tag output give you? I can't imagine it giving you any more than a point and string, which would be the exact same inputs that you gave to the tag component, so why can't you just use those?

In terms of fabrication labeling tags are really not of much help, other than visually what you see within the viewport. If you need text that has the potential to be fabricated/laser cut, then the text needs to be actual geometry, which the text tag doesn't create.

Permalink Reply by Luke Semo on August 12, 2009 at 9:24am

Ah, we run Dimension ULS lasers, which use printer interfaces to generate cutfiles. Text dots are printed, thus cut. Also, oriented text tags can be exploded post-bake into lines, which we've done. The problem we've had is maintaining explicit relationships between line segments in a cut, and their respective annotations while unrolling. We can do it by hand, but being able to do it within a GH script would be fantastic, as we're working on a project that might involve unrolling several hundred componens.

I concede, though, it is a low priority suggestion with a minuscule scope.

Permalink Reply by Damien Alomar on August 12, 2009 at 10:54am

This still doesn't sound like the output of the text tag is the issue. If you're trying to retain label relationships during unrolling there's only a few ways that I know to take care of that. There are about two ways to take care of labeling surfaces in away that will "persist" after unrolling. The first, which is more manual, but is a little more straightforward, is to actually trim the label from the surface. The trims should be retained by the unrolling if properly selected and you'll have your curves. The second, which is much more viable, especially for large numbers of surfaces, is to set the name of the object before unrolling, then use that name to add a label (via script). There are GH scripts out there that will name objects while they are baked, and I'm sure there are scripts out there that will take the name of an object and either add text, text curves, or a text dot. Does that sound like it might help?