Plug-in for making exploded views

Works very well! The functionality here seems like a natural extension of the ‘Named Positions’ panel. At the moment, it is missing the ‘Animate’ aspect of what this provides.

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You think you might want to define multiple exploded views that can be invoked by name?

I love it !
Thank you David !

Great plugin, thanks

@wim, @Helvetosaur, @ottocad_com, @emilio

I just uploaded a newer version (first post, I amended the download). This is almost a total rewrite, completely different approach. As a result you can now use regular Rhino commands to define the transformations, but it also means the animations are less pretty.

@davidrutten, I see that there is an Explosion command available after installing this new one but I cannot set a trajectory. The Trajectory command appears to have disappeared.

Yup, see the first post in this discussion for all the changes.

I see. Sorry!

Thank you so much, this is very useful!

Yes! Would be nice to have named explosions, or somehow work the functionality into the named positions panel.

This seems like a much better approach to me- very nice.

-Pascal

Yeah, unfortunately is very much breaks Rhino protocol, which is always a shame…

I like this better too.

I’m noticing that a rotation added to a fragment object rotates about, what seems to be, volume centroid, rather than gumball location. Is there a way of having fragments follow a prescribed path, rather than one based on the vc or bounding box?

Thanks

Nope. The explosion transformation is defined by two planes (source and target). Initially both planes are centred on the boundingbox of the object, but when you move the orange objects the target plane gets updated. If the original object moves, both the source and the target plane are moved with it. The animation during Explosion is just a blending of these two planes, no attempt is made to mimic the (potentially large amount of) transform operations that went into target.

If specific motions need to be handled, then specific commands need to be written to cater to those motions (like I did for a single move and a single rotate in the first version of the plugin).

OK. Thanks for the clarification. I’ll keep playing.

Excellent plug-in @DavidRutten will save lots of time creating exploded views of assemblies for screenshots or prints.

‘DisplayExplosionRecords’ doesn’t seem to be working here, although ‘Explosion preview enabled’ does appear in the command line.

If you are planning to progress the plug-in, I second @fraguada suggestion for the ability to save named explosion states - for complex jobs with multiple screenshots, this will be really useful.

Also the ability to edit the location of a fragment while it is in the exploded state, i.e. the target is updated and the pre-exploded source is maintained, or an option to use either current source (before edit) or original source. The poor fragment can’t find it’s way home…

It is not a lot different from using NamedPositions. A more ‘dedicated’ process, and the animation is nice- it seems like the call for named explosions makes this really a job for an extended NamedPositions.

-Pascal

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Nice work David.
Purely just being able to switch between exploded and assembled is a really ability to now have.
I second the suggestions from BrianM.
Lovely work either way.]

-Rupert

very nice work, thank you very much.
Waiting for new features :wink:
In the meantime, thanks again

Stefano

The animations unfortunately don’t display when used with larger models (I’m exploding the structure, curtain wall, and interior lantern of the upper 10 stories of a supertall tower) which, so far as I can tell, makes this no different from Named Positions. Are there other differences here?

I’m also not sure how useful non-keyframeable animations are in our workflows, as it would require capture and editing in Camtasia rather than allowing for direct output from Rhino.

Also, if I pre-select objects for the explosion record, I lose the selection upon the BeginExplosionRecord command. This is a bit frustrating. So far as I know there is no functionality for saving selection sets in Rhino - am I mistaken?

Thanks!
Brian