im brand new to rhino community, however its been a while ive been searching a way to develop a CAD tool, and Rhino seemed to be the best way to do that.
however, im not a programmer or TI professional, although in the past had experience as computer science student…
Could you give some guidelines how to proceed on my project??
I need to develop a tool that can do something next to this one…the chain feature in exocad!
it doesn`t have to be beauty, only functional…also, i already have the library models (teeth) in .stl, .off and other extensions.
I don`t even have a clue on where to start!!!
tryied several TI professionals i have contact but they flee away when i say the words 3D or CAD development!!
Need urgent some enlightment!!!
appreciated your time and attention!
Well, after looking at a few minutes of the video, it would appear most or all of what that particular tool does can be accomplished using standard Rhino commands, though maybe with a few extra steps. But if you can start with that, then it gives you a better idea of where to actually put the ‘automation’ effort in.
To do this in Rhino as-is, you need to first draw a straight line and arrange the teeth along it, and a curved line representing what they call the “chain.” Then using the Flow command with history on, the teeth are arranged along that curve. Then you can tweak the input and output curves and move the source teeth relative to the input straight line to adjust them.
To automate this further, to match the interactivity is probably possible with a Python script, though I know that debugging a complex script with event-handling gets a bit hairy.
appreciatted the answer Jim,
im still getting started at Rhino, until didnt downloaded it.
However you already got me some clues, for example, the script should be in python!
in technical or programming language, how could i refer to the teeth?? solids, entities, or what>>?
also, if you can, obsiously, i use already exocad, a older version, the files are always uploaded from .off or .eoff library,
kind of NURBS if not mystaken. then at some point, they are converted to .stl in order to be exported to 3d printers…
would .off the best type of file to work on or do you have other indication?
Well Python is a good place to start with programming Rhino, anyway.
You’ve got a lot of questions here that you need to just get Rhino and learn a bit about it and the basics of RhinoCommon before really worrying too much about the specific thing you’re trying to do. And indeed as I pointed out you can get basically the same function without doing any coding at all, so try that out before deciding that you really need to spend the time to code something.
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thanks for the advices, Jim,
indeed i`m a little anxious with solving my issue, but these two comments gave me some relief on my concerns!