Your grasshopper file has so much going on it is not runnable at an acceptable speed. To save people who would like to help you from wasting too much time, please upload a Rhino file with just the surface in it.
You might want to consider this sort of simplification yourself while problem solving your issues. It helps when your PC can keep up with your brain!
So your surface is a mesh which means the bottom edge is a polyline with a series of short straight lines connected together. Do you want your panels to follow that polyline strictly or do you want your panels to follow a circular arc fitted through the mesh edge?
My panel does not follow the mesh lines because the mesh is in a very messy situation. Starting from the part you will see in my panel’s screenshot, I want it to be in the dimensions I mentioned above (2438.4 mm width, 914.4 mm height), and I want there to be a gap between these dimensions.
I have attached the surface I obtained using the mesh circles and the starting point of the panels. You can find the Grasshopper file of the divided surface I created earlier.
I apologize for the mistake. It should be the length of the curve, meaning the length visible when looking at the geometry from the outside. When the curve is opened, the length will increase even more.
If you want a regular pattern, your dimensions don’t add up. The base circle circumference is 100609.505mm. That isn’t a multiple of 2438.4 + 25…
Thank you for the information. The pattern will be the same up to a point, but to maintain the 2438.4 mm measurement, it will proceed in a 2438.4+25 mm gap pattern. When the circle is complete, the remaining row will be smaller than this measurement, and the pattern will be eliminated there.
This is just an example; it doesn’t matter where it’s small, but I need to get a panel that’s as accurate as possible.
I think @jeremy5 point was that if you have a circle with fixed circumference (A), you can’t divide it into equal sections of specific length X with specific gap Z. If X is fixed then Y must change. You can’t have X and Y a fixed size if you want equal distribution. If you want that then your main shape (A) must change size to match those fixed sizes.
Yes, I understand what you mean, you’re right, but it doesn’t have to be the entire circle. I can compromise on that point. Because when we divide the diameter of the circle into the required width, we get a result of 41.2. I can get 40 panels of the size I want and 1 panel that is larger than I want, right?
However, life being short, I did make some simplifications. The main one being that I worked with a simple conic without the cut-outs and indentation you have. Also, I’ve started with a nurbs surface, not mesh.
I’ve also used this as an opportunity to tidy up the drawing: moving the base of the cone to the origin and squaring it up so the axis is a true vertical and the seam is square on to the viewports. This doesn’t affect the workings of the script but does make me happy.
I don’t know how helpful this will be but, if nothing else, it is always good to see someone else’s interpretation of a problem - if only to reassure yourself that you’ve already found a better way!
Thank you so much for your help — it’s been incredibly insightful. Honestly, you’ve shown such an elegant way of approaching this. If you saw how long and complicated the scripts I was using to achieve the same result were, you wouldn’t believe it!
However, I’ve run into one issue. When I use the start point , centre point you specified and input the cutting surface, I end up getting the result shown in the screenshot. I haven’t changed anything in the script, so I’m not sure why this is happening. Do you have any idea what might be causing this?
Sorry, having said that moving to origin wouldn’t affect operation I fell into the trap of using standard XY planes in some of the clusters.
I’ve pulled the Centre location through to modify them and you should now get the correct result. Here’s the updated file: JSpanellingFarOut.gh (54.8 KB)
