Hi all,
I created a pattern using parakeet in Grasshopper, that I want to lasercut to decorate a fireplace.
To do that, I need to turn the pattern into a single shape by connecting endpoints:
The only way feasible seems to me to be CurveBoolean after baking in Rhino and adding a bounding box, as GH cannot distinguish which polylines need to be connected.
But, CurveBoolean simply doesn’t work on this set. I.e it basically crashes Rhino after a long wait. I find it hard too believe that this shape would be too complex to make this possible. EDIT it does work after a while, but takes a minute or so. I would like to make more intricate patterns, though…
I’ve had trouble with this kind of geometry before, to turn the polylines into meshes in an efficiënt way. That was kind of resolved by using a specific nautilus component (thanks to the great help from people on this forum). But the original issue remains. The file for this pattern is 15mb, which seems quite big for basically a bunch of polylines.
I think the main issue is the ‘offset polyline’ (or the Clipper 2 equivalent) component used. Arcs are converted to polylines, where a lot of segments are needed to keep a fluid shape. Hence a lot of control points (around 400k) and difficult to Curveboolean.
Why is there no curve equivalent to ‘thicken lines’? And why do polylines put so much more stress on all subsequent operations in Rhino? Turning it into 3D geometry becomes basically impossible. Is there a way to convert back to curves (I tried Nautilus polyline to Arcs and lines, but that doesn’t really work)?
Thank you for your insighs.
P.S if there would be a way to do this operation directly in GH, that would be great. I did not manage with region difference/intersection.
P.P.S I’m really running into trouble lately creating decorative geometry like this (= lots of curves, polylines), GH takes ages to calculate. Even though I have a brand new laptop (with decent CPU). Can someone point me to some information on ways to optimize workflows to keep curves clean and manageable? It feels like I’m missing some basic insights on this.
Thanks again!
Parakeet_Curves.3dm (14.8 MB)