First of all, we love all your plugins at our office, we use it often and saved us a butt-load of time! Thank you for everything!
This topic is regarding the ‘Define Block’ component that you somewhat recently added. I am curious if it’s easy to upgrade so it could also have text as input? It’s a completely different entity than geometry and therefore I imagine it could be difficult to program.
At our office we create 100 to 1000’s different CNC plates for every housing project with both unique and standard elements. Working with blocks saved us a lot of time because we need to manually change standard repetitive elements. To add extra textual input to the blocks we either used Elefronts text creator that can be combined with their define block component or used a text to geometry converter so we can connect it to the Human Define Block Component. But both approaches are not ideal (Elefront is very heavy compared to your components )
At the moment we are thinking of writing the component our selves, but I can imagine this functionality already crossed your mind. For example, making the justified text component more versatile and giving it an output that can be connected to the Define block component. I hope I make sense.
This would require a fair bit of modification to Human — you’d have to be able to output text objects from the justified text component, and the define block component would need to accept RhinoObject types instead of just GeometryBase. Unfortunately I don’t think I have time to make these modifications any time soon. You might find it easiest to use the existing components to define the block, and then use the doc.InstanceDefinitions.ModifyGeometry method to add the text elements afterwards.
@rolf did you ever find a good solution to this problem? I’m in the same situation. I need to create blocks that can include special text like “date” and “pagename” hopefully through human.
My workaround is using a script to cast text to simple geometry, so you can add it to the Define BLock component. Which works fine and helped me do a few projects, but due to readability issues we plan to create our own simplified bake component. Curious to see if we can make it faster than the Human plugin, doubt it though. We try to post it here when finished, still trying to convince my company open source is the way to go.
Also: Elefront still does the trick with normal text, but it has a quite a few different problems.
would be great if they let you share it. After pushing further I’ve gotten elefront to work, but got stuck for a while, before finding that I had to double click bake all to not have grasshopper stall.
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