Circular arc surprise (at least for me)

[Birk_Binnard]

I made this bowl shape

from a simple arrangement of 2 circular arcs arranged to make a single planar closed curve:

To make the 3D shape I used Divide Curve to create points along the curve and then moved each point up by a value equal to it’s distance from the origin. Then I used IntCrv to make a single closed 3D curve which I fed to Pipe to make the final 3D printable shape.

In order to make a functional bowl I added a bottom made from a Cylinder. This is what my GH file looks like:

I’m posting this because I was quite surprised at the number of different shapes that result from simply changing the number of points in the Divide Curve component. I’ve saved a number of these in the Solution State values inside the GH file. It certainly did not occur to me that connected circular planar arcs could produce such geometry.
ArcBowl.gh (19.6 KB)

[Bruce_Shapiro]

That is beautiful! But after looking at your script and playing with it, I’m not surprised that despite the simple 2-arc construction, it is capable of tremendous variation. I find this often with curve arrays that periodically overlap. I think of it as “precessional interference” – certain parameter settings produce unexpectedly pretty overlap, while just slight variation away from those settings results in aesthetically mundane output. I swapped polylines for your interpolated curves to accentuate:

[Birk_Binnard]

Poly lines - most excellent! I just default to Interpolate because in general I prefer curvy shapes with no corners. But here the corners can be more indicative of what’s behind the geometry. Thanks for pointing this out.