I am trying to make a dome out of truncated cones for a project I am fabricating! I have not used rhino in a while so i am a bit rusty.
I have been using arraypolar to put my cones in a circle, but whenever I use orient to start the next tier of cones, they rotate and the angles get messed up! Can anyone think of a better way to do this?
something like this ? - at least a starting point
Perhaps! I have little experience with grasshopper and desire even cone placement but will give it a shot!
Hey Piper,
If you’re sticking with Rhino for now, one workaround could be using Rotate3D instead of Orient to manually control the cone alignment between tiers, especially if the base circles stay consistent. Another approach is to use Copy and adjust placement with Gumball while keeping the rotation fixed. It’s a bit more manual, but can help avoid those unexpected angle shifts. Hope that helps while you get more comfortable with Grasshopper!
Hello piper,
Perhaps another approach would be to tween between two curves and then orient your object per curve and then do your array. Very manual on the one hand but could give you the control of how the rows of cones orient to each other given that this is a project for fabrication.
Thank you,
Andy
trucnatedCones_dome.3dm (1.8 MB)
If you want a ring of cones to sit neatly row on row so that each cone rests on the two below it then you need the same number of cones in each row. Since the circles of latitude get smaller as you go up, the diameter of the cones has to get smaller as you progress up the rows. Here’s an illustration of the overlap you get if you keep the cones the same size:
If you make the cones smaller, you also reduce the vertical angular displacement and that must be taken into account in calculating the position of the next row.
A nice exercise for keeping the brain sharp. Thank you!
Jeremy
Thank you for your thoughtful response! I fear that you are correct!
