This looks brilliant, but after watching the presentation (stopping at fabrication, seemed unrelated to GH) I’m not sure what to do with the just knowing this exists. The video doesn’t describe how eleFront is used, and checking out their website I don’t see any starting point for learning the tools. New Features are commented on, but I did not come across any starting point. Feels like signing up for a gym to get back in shape and the personal trainer saying “ok lets start with piston squats”… while the end goal might be pistonl squats isn’t no place to start training. I’m lost and not sure how to apply this to my situation.
Forgive the wall of text but I think it might be valuable since I don’t think we’re on the same page. I appreciate any help but the possible solution presented by Quan Li I did not agree with because the solution required additional steps and the model I have directly when I opened the code did no look like my intended result. Could be I’ve messed something up again but all I did was open the link in a fresh file.
I can get behind creating something in GH, backing it in GH and referencing back in another file. Makes sense and you don’t loose the transparency having everything linked together. Which is one of the biggest appeals to GH from my perspective. I love the idea of having a model referenced to different components so that if I change “X” and “Y” is linked to some component of “X” then “Y” will update accordingly. Like I said, I like to think of myself as a fast drafter in CAD… and myself nor anyone on the planet is faster than a processor so long as you are knowledgeable enough to know how to frame the correct inputs. I lean into automation wherever possible in my continuing education. Take for instance in the composite panel world there exist a CAD extension that will unfold draw all parts for CNC (tooling lines, pilot holes, etc). It’s brilliant and I want to know how to do similar things in GH because it’s abundantly clear the tools exist if you know what you’re doing. Really, hats off GH is amazing and will change or already has changed the field. Anyways…
I don’t want to loose transparency manually drawing three dimensional shapes because if anything changes, it’s time to redraw. That is the step I’m trying to skip by investing time into learning GH. Redrafting is one of the biggest time sinks we grapple with in drafting. Related to my experience this is the selling point for why is GH useful. I can’t express enough how interested I am in learning these workflows to prevent redrafting of complex systems.
That said, how is this related to my original question. Forget the offset, whatever tool fits the purpose is what I’m after. I started with offset because I figured if I can model the surface of the substrate in question I can offset this surface based on the system depth and be done. It has worked on simple surfaces but not this one. Extrude is out, because it wont follow perpendicular to the faces so next step seemed to be try a sweep. The sweep seemed close to to what I was after but it also had issues. Currently I’ve been messing around with trying to just create a wireframe of the desired surface (knowing that if I can create the wireframe I can model a surface within).
Maybe I should rephrase my question to be something along the lines of -How would you create a clean surface based on a rail? or wireframe? or surface? I’m uncertain how to phrase the question.
I started by using the point cloud to define points on the face of substrate (specifically near the corners) and reset their Z axis to a common elevation. The next step was to connect the points at either end of the substrate and visually check for clashes (I’m sure there’s a way and it would be pretty trick to convert the point cloud to a mesh, or try that shrink wrap, and then check for an intersection along that surface to curve interaction. That would be… insane, but not the point of this post). After manually checking for clashes and agreeing that this is a “good” line, the lines are extended to provide corners and a polyline was created that would be my “plan cut”. I then moved the points as needed in elevation. Once I did that I used a number off surface tools (and some that output a brep and not a surface?). This last step is where I seemed to have gone off the rails since the outputs to not work feeding into new components.
So how would I go about not making this mistake to get where I want to end up? The end goal is to produce the surface curves for a panel system 2" from the face of substrate shown in the point cloud (or to say 2" from the wireframe/surface model provided)
