Flow along a surface and scale objects proportionally

I’ve been looking at the tutorials and similar topics in the forum but can’t seem to work this out without doing it by hand.

I’d like to flow a row of arrayed circles along a surface which tapers along it’s length, when I try I end up with squashed or elongated ellipses, is there a way to flow a shape along a surface but scale it proportionally at the same time?

The manual method I would adopt would be to draw each circle tangent to the next along the tapering ribbon then flow that along the surface.

Thanks in advance

Ribbon V1.0.3dm (249.7 KB)

(I’m expecting a Grasshopper only solution as the number of circles would increase along the tapered length… it looks as though I can only select a fixed offset or divide by a fixed number along the length and not apply an offset relative to the next circles opposing quadrant)

Grasshopper is not available on OSX, I wish, but I regress.

I did have something similar once and here is a link to Phython / Scripting discussion.

This may help. though if you only have this one ribbon, manually might be quicker.

I did a few at there end of your flow from circles.

Ribbon V2.0.3dm (393.6 KB)

IHTH - randy

1 Like

Hi Randy,

I was just doodling, not sure which direction the shape is going to take then wondered if I could flow the shape while scaling it, thank you for the script though.

I’m holding out for Grasshopper on the Mac : ) I may have to move back to PC for a wile though if it’s not coming for a while… That and Spaceclaim.

Thanks again