Boolean Mask?

Rhino Rhino for Windows
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1

Hey All,

I’ve been looking for a feature in Rhino for a while and not sure if it exists or if it is being explored.

I’m an avid Grasshopper and Photoshop user, and I’ve come to really prioritize the use of masking objects to be adjusted later. In Rhino, it would be really cool if you could set a layer as a ‘masking’ layer, and any geometry added to it would Boolean a negative out of any intersecting geometry.

I could imagine, say creating a repetitive block for an architectural facade relief, and in the block applying a Boolean Mask to cut away the geometry. Then later adjusting the Mask if something isn’t looking right. Or for cutting interesting cutaways, adding to a door block so it automatically cuts away a wall when placed, etc.

I know Grasshopper has a the SolidDifference feature among other things, but the ability to manually manipulate an object mask would be really useful. I’m sure there would be some coding gymnastics that would be needed to get this to work correctly, but just a thought!

2

Things like you described are totally possible. You can bake Grasshopper objects to manipulate in Rhino and then reference the geometry from Rhino back to Grasshopper using the new Grasshopper Rhino components.

3

Thanks for the reply,

I know the possibilities while using Grasshopper, but I mean native to Rhino - manual adjustment of a Boolean Mask within the layers, so you could use them in blocks. Jumping back and forth from Rhino to Grasshopper, and in and out of blocks, groups, layers, etc can be cumbersome and doesn’t allow for saving blocks as separate files to simply import and apply to geometry. And if it does, it would require specific plugins and figuring out a complex workflow

4

Got you.

I’d like to be able to use hatches as displacement or opacity map.