So, unfortunately I am a very button-clicky person, and I am also very reliant on the command line in Rhino.
I am not wanting someone to solve the problem for me as such, but I have never really used Grasshopper (used a bit of Nautilus and Pufferfish, then ran away), so I feel rather dumb about it.
Anyway, I often find myself wanting to connect cables between items. I don’t always want to do it in a “proper” way (maintain constant lengths, ribbon cables, whatever). However it would be nice if they were:
- Not self-intersecting
- Have randomisation control (straightness, entanglement, smoothness)
- One can spread the ends across two arbitrary end surfaces at a perpendicular, so they have a controllable “clustering”.
- Maintain perpendicularity at the ends.
- Maintain thier curves (or end points) to be baked, so I can also use the curve ends as points to place N termination blocks or other junctions.
Below is the embarassingly slow method I am using for my cables. I take normal curves on a pair of surfaces and make short perpendicular curves to theseurfaces, and then just flow them by hand around objects using interstitial segments.
Sometimes I try and work around it by using Record History in a hideous way to make my first cable and junctions, and then see if I can drag the bits around and hope the History changes the pipe for me.
Having a look around, I came across this Blender Geometry node tutourial:
I would think that Grasshopper could provide me with the functionality I want to have (I’d imagine somewhat even more superior and controllable to the Blender GN approach), but I wonder if anyone here thinks that this is a reasonable expectation. I’m happy to go and try learn myself, if it takes me some weeks. It isn’t important in the sense that I only do these things for aesthetic rendering quality, and my Line-Line-BlendCrv routine seems very lacklustre.
Really, one would take two surfaces, with N randomly scattered short perpendicular lines, 1:1, and then do something like join all arbitray pairs, but with parameterisations that permit the nice Blender Geometry Node behaviours shown in the video.
Thank you for any advice.