from rhino into grasshopper

Is there some way to 'reverse bake' an object from rhino into grasshopper so it will always be in the script? For example.. a curvy surface that is defined in rhino and doesnt have real parametric values? I want to be able to have the same surface referenced in the GH file, regardless of the open rhino file.

Im just curious becuase i keep opening old scripts that throw a whole bunch of error messages because there isnt a surface set for the current rhino file. It would be great If i could just reference a specific surface in the script without having to rebuild it from scratch with parameters.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Suryansh Chandra on July 7, 2010 at 5:18am

Well, technically, yes, but to a very limited extent, and in an extremely cumbersome way. Points is really easy, as its just a bunch of coordinates that you can easily store in text panels. Curves gets a bit more complex, which you first extract CVs from, then store the coordinates of each CV of each crv in text panels. God save you if you have hundreds of curves.

Next in line, surfaces. Same story. Get CVs, save coordinates in text panels, but where this gets tricky is trim information -- that can't be deciphered to 'save-able' text anywhere within grasshopper. Same with meshes, you will have to pretty much store the entire mesh topology (vertex coordinates, face vertex indices, etc) within text panels.

Perhaps it would be far easier to keep related Rhino+GH files together. Though I agree this could do with some kind of a 'sticky' feature where a GH files tries to stick to its 3dm counterpart, and moves/copies/renames/deletes with it.. but again, that can be super annoying too -- and moreover, this would step into the realms of windows file systems, much outside GH.

Permalink Reply by brian on July 7, 2010 at 6:31am

Actually I dont understand how I could even use panels. I can plug a panel into a list of points, but once i disconnect that panel it looses its data. For example If i stream point coordiantes to a panel and then stream that to an external source (ie to a text file) and then copy and paste the same information into a blank panel, GH will no longer remember that its PT information. When I connect the new panel to a 'point' icon it doesnt work.

Am I missing something?

thanks!

Permalink Reply by Suryansh Chandra on July 7, 2010 at 8:57am

All it takes is this:

Permalink Reply by Jon Mirtschin on July 7, 2010 at 12:07pm

Didn't David also mention in the new features of the new release that you can somehow reference objects by name (I think it can be done similar to the panel input above)? I haven't tried this, but it would be a really powerful way of linking to objects in a model.

Permalink Reply by Suryansh Chandra on July 12, 2010 at 11:23am

Yup, that's been there for a while, and the new version adds object referencing by object & layer name. But that probably wouldn't be too helpful in the question raised here, because Brian is probably looking to apply the same GH definition to different Rhino files.

Permalink Reply by Paul N Jeffries on July 7, 2010 at 11:09am

I think the idea is that you copy the information out of that panel and paste it into one that isn't connected to anything - that way it won't change when the points are disconnected.

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