Find Area of only one side

I have an object but I only want to find the area from one point of view (like the front view) not the entire object. Is there a way to do this in rhino? Do I just need to make it into a wireframe and make sure all curves are closed?

Thanks for your help.

hmmm - can you post the object wih some description of how you want to get the area? Off hand, I’d think some combination of CPlane > View, Silhouette, ProjectToCPlane, CurveBoolean and then Area might get you there but it is hard to say without a better idea of what you need.

-Pascal

Hello @SMalln, and @pascal, I also have similar problem often when dealing with yacht bulkheads which I have thicknessed in the model to their true thickness(Solid) and then have to calculate material surface areas early on in design, before unrolling etc. Sofar my only solution is to manually go through each piece using ExtractSrf with the copy option onto a new layer and extract a single face from each bulkhead. I then run the area command on the duplicated single faces.
I have tried making a grasshopper solution which had varied results but was never 100% accurate.
In grasshopper I figured the edge surfaces would have much smaller area than the face so I exploded and calculated the area of every surface face in each solid and then filtered out the pieces with area size below a certain threshold. What remained was the front and back faces which I then just divided the area value by 2 to get the area of all the single large faces.
This only worked if there was a large difference between the face and edge surface areas, but for smaller parts or mixed size parts the smaller edge surfaces didn’t filter out 100%.
Thus I would also be interested in better a solution to this. Michael VS

Hi Michael- Sub-object (ctrl-shift click) will work here to get one or more faces in a polysurface for Area to work on.

-Pascal

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Hi @pascal, Ok. Yes. Thanks. I do use sub-object selection too sometimes, but can get tricky when there are many (50+) parts and one wrong click and you have to start all over again with the sub-selection.Michael VS

Hi Michael- as-is this is probably overkill, but it might help if the areas you are looking for are made up of multiple faces - I’ve attached a plug-in that extracts tangent faces from a polysurface - optionally copies - and makes them into a new polysurface which could then be queried with Area, then deleted.

It should be quite simple to add an area report for the selected faces in addition to, or instead of, extracting them.
Save, then Drag and drop onto Rhino to add ExtractTangentFaces as a command.

ExtractTangentFaces.rhp (39.5 KB)

-Pascal