baking numbers as curves

Is their a way to bake numbers as curves?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Danny Boyes on July 21, 2010 at 3:13pm

What do you want the number to represent? If it's length then you could use the SDL line component, which requires three inputs Starting Point, Direction and Length. Origin for start, Z Vector for direction and your number value in Length.

Permalink Reply by John Gulliford on July 21, 2010 at 3:21pm

hey danny,

I was looking to number pieces for laser cutting and I am trying to find an automated way of doing so. There is a rhino command that creates a number as an outlined curve, which the laser cutter can read, however tedious. There is an automated way of numbering in grasshopper but there is no way to bake that component and extract or output curves. I hope this is a clearer explanation

Permalink Reply by Danny Boyes on July 21, 2010 at 3:32pm

I'm with you now, my brian's not working this late! have a look at Giulio's page there's a component that will bake text as lines. http://www.giuliopiacentino.com/grasshopper-tools/ down near the bottom under font.

Permalink Reply by taz on July 21, 2010 at 7:45pm

John,

[Text Tag 3D] is bakeable... when you right click on the component there is no egg, but you can still highlight it and hit the canvas toolbar egg.

If you explode the baked text you'll get outline curves.

The have been several single line font discussions which you may also be interested in. The most recent is here (another Giulio production!):

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/forum/topics/invalid-text-lines-single

Permalink Reply by taz on July 21, 2010 at 7:56pm

For Giulio's script to work you need to have the fonts loaded on your computer, specifically "Machine Tool Handscript".

You can track down the fonts from here:

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/forum/topics/text-curves-from-a-string

Permalink Reply by Giulio Piacentino on July 22, 2010 at 4:40am

Hi John,

how would you want to extract the curves? As normal Grasshopper curves?
Could you also tell: the font you want to use and your current Grasshopper version?
Thanks,

- Giulio
________________
giulio@mcneel.com
McNeel Europe, Barcelona

Permalink Reply by John Gulliford on July 28, 2010 at 9:40am

Hi Giulio.

Sorry for the late reply... I was looking for any single curve font and I am using version 0.7.0037. I ended up baking [Text Tag 3d] and exploding the baked text into curves in response to Taz's suggestion. I appreciate your response and input.

Visca el Barça! my wife is Catalan!

Permalink Reply by Benjamin Golder on July 21, 2010 at 8:37pm

This is a relevant discussion:
http://www.grasshopper3d.com/forum/topics/invalid-text-lines-single

also, feel free to mess with these two definitions I've attached. I wish I had more time to clean them up and explain them, but I don't. :( sorry.
I have used Giulio Piacentino's definition along with some of my own to make a lot of single stroke numbers for CNC purposes, many times. I still haven't finished working through the steps to get letters and other characters to come out right. But you can see that others have made a lot of progress in that direction.

So the short answer to your question is: Yes, you can nicely bake numbers as single stroke curves using grasshopper for CNC purposes.
But the catch is that you might have to tinker and edit some definitions first to understand how to do it.

Good luck!

Attachments:

CNC Single Line Text.ghx, 835 KB
CNC Text Fixer.ghx, 738 KB

Permalink Reply by taz on July 22, 2010 at 10:35pm

Ben,

I made a hack of Guilio's hack that seems to work quite well, at least for Machine Tool San Serif. It's a bit of post-processing hi-jinks.

Check it out if you're interested... I think it will only work with the GH 0.6 series.

http://fancywires.com/?p=499