Export surface to illustrator

Let’s say I have a set of patterns that I want to randomly tile on a wall. The pattern is just positive and negative space (just black on a white wall). How can I export it to illustrator so that the regions I determine to be black in Rhino show up as black in illustrator?

I’ve tried to export surfaces to illustrator before, but they don’t actually import as a filled region- it usually shows up as its naked edge and a UV isocurve. These patterns are 2D and they are being applied to a 2D wall- so these surfaces are flat. And sure, I can export a bunch of closed curves and then apply a fill, but I am in a situation where there are curves in curves that knock out parts of the positive space. Something like this:

I don’t want to manually go in and paint-bucket the black.

Easiest way I know is to export all curves that define the black areas and combine them in illustrator into 1. You cannot do this in Rhino

Alight, I tried it out. It seems to be the exclude tool in pathfinder that identifies curve overlaps and determines positive and negative space.

Hi Lawrence - try: make the pattern from curves in Rhino (DupBorder may be enough if those are all separate surfaces…?) and fill the curves with solid hatches (Hatch command) - these will export as fills to AI.

-Pascal

ah, cool, didn’t know that,

@lawrenceyy sorry for wrong info

Interesting, I don’t use hatch much. Is there a way to hatch in grasshopper?

Hi Lawrence - it does not look like there is a GH component for this, I don’t see one anyway, but you may be able to use a script component to add hatches.

-Pascal

the Human plugin has a hatch component.

edit: it seems to generate surfaces rather than hatches…

@lawrenceyy, does the attached work for you?
hatches.gh (12.5 KB)

the FabTools plugin has hatches

Thanks for your help.

I have not tested it out, because I found a solution that worked. I hatched the pattern and then blocked it. I have a component that will bake blocks to a plane, so I used it in grasshopper to generate the wall pattern.