Best way to transform complex geometry in grasshopper? (Solution offered)

[filmdp]

I have a simple version of a model that I am using in Grasshopper that works fine for basic visualization, however I would like to be able to pull in a much larger and more complex variant of that model and apply transforms generated by Grasshopper to it for interactive rendering without massively slowing down my Grasshopper flow processing time.

The solution I found was to use the ExtractRenderMesh command within Rhino and then apply my transforms to the resultant mesh instead of the base BREP. The speed difference was significant. In fact it made me wonder if this could be done in a pre-process step within Grasshopper as a one-shot command on startup (instead of a manual process within Rhino).

In a perfect world I would love to be able to bake UVs to this render mesh as well, I’m not sure if there is a way to do this (so I can, for example, project textures from a single viewpoint onto the model and then keep them there by applying a Custom Preview).

• Should I be looking at using blocks as well?
• Can I automatically pipeline meshes efficiently out of Rhino into other software such as Blender or Three.js in the browser? I’ve passed simple geometry as vertex lists out of Grasshopper before, what’s the stepped up equivalent of this with complex meshes and file formats instead of data streams?

Thanks!

[TomTom (Tom)]

@filmdp

Can I automatically pipeline meshes efficiently out of Rhino into other software such as Blender or Three.js in the browser

I think the most efficient way of sharing data is probably Shared Memory (aka Memory Mapped Files). This is probably how I would approach this problem. More versatile is probably a TCP socket or web-socket (for web applications) .

I just recently provided a Python3 snippet here:

Create a Dictionary in Grasshopper, reference it (un-wired)

You can also use Inter-Process-Communication like Shared Memory. This does not only work language-independent, but also process- or domain-independent. The code is a simple logic for outside of Rhino/GH. You need to keep the “server” open until you don’t need it anymore. This requires to tweak it a bit in Rhino/GH. But this is only an example on how to tackle this problem in a more general way. Hope this gives you an inspiration… Python 3 “server”. The logic which creates a shared memory sect…

However, note that as long as you are not coding the entire process efficiently (maybe also not using CPython here), you might loose the advantage somewhere else.