Divide Distance

Connecting a curve, and a list of Distances produces undesirable results. Only upon exploration did I discover that this component only repeats one distance over the curve.

My natural expectation for this component was that a list of distances would create points along the curve separated by the respective distances. (that seems more powerful in the Grasshopper way).

So, this is a feature request. Please give users a toggle option to repeat the distance list or not. That way one value would perform as current, and then a list could either be repeated to the end of the curve or create just the number of points to match the distance list.

Thanks.

Also, Connecting an Arc-like Curve causes a warning. "1. One of the distance divisions failed on the first attempt. Entire sequence aborted."

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Benjamin Felbrich on November 20, 2013 at 12:19pm

Actually what you discovered upon exploration is exactly what the command description tells about the way the component works. You can easily and precisely retrieve subcurves by creating a list of consecutive domains (don't forget to divide by the length of the curve) and appliing it to the command "SubCurve".

According to the way GH works, it's likely to happen, that when you give a list of values to a command (as you did with the lengthes) it executes the same command over and over again until your longest list of inputs is over.

Permalink Reply by Gabe Krause on November 21, 2013 at 1:34pm

The Subcurve method would be great if we wanted to divide distances along the curves length. In fact the Dash Pattern component could work well for that too. But those provides different results than the "line of sight" division that the Divide Distance component provides.

Yeah, you're right about how GH works, same command on each item until the list ends.

I just can't think of any way to do what I need without introducing some form of recursion like Hoopsnake. It would be nice if Divide Distance could have a mode to accept a list of distances much like Dash Pattern does. Thus, the feature request.

The Curve to Polyline component seems like it could also be adapted to create a polyline with a list of specified segment lengths. But I haven't been able to accomplish what I need with that either.

Permalink Reply by Benjamin Felbrich on November 24, 2013 at 10:16am

Oh sure you're right,
I misread the divide distance with the divide length component.
I'm not very sure, but did you think of applying "divide length" to a derivative of your curve? Just an idea, but since it represents information about the curvature of your curve there might be a solution to the problem..

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