Gradient Point Clouds

Hello All,
I want to construct a gradient point cloud, where in, the density of the point cloud is a function of some type of input: topography, distance along a line, etc. Any ideas?

If you have the function just evaluate it at a range and add points according to the function. If you want to do this with millions of points Rhino is probably not the best bet. But with less than a million points I think you can use Grasshopper.

You should be able to do millions of points using the PointCloud object no problem. Even Rhino 6 on my poor Macbook Pro does 15 million point pointclouds no problem.

Even colored pointclouds with 100 million points can be imported into Rhino 6 and displayed. But this is definitely at the upper limit as Rhino becomes sluggish when trying to change the view. And I had to write my own Python/C++ parallel code to reduce the pointcloud import time from around 1 hour down to less than a minute.

Regards,
Terry.


cool. Kind of what I was getting at. That being said, how do you do that in 3D? I will take a stab later. Prefer to write the whole thing in python.

Go for it! Show us how.

haha! TBH I am somewhat new to scripting. So happy to put the work in, but I am not sure where to look, Ala, some more fundamental python/geometric algorithm that I can build on.

also, on another note, Y cant we access the source code behind each grasshopper component??? Is it VB-SCRIPT?

Grasshopper is not open source but you have access to the library. I remember David said it was VB, now mostly C#. GH2 will be all C#.

Whereas adapting the model I posted to 3D isn’t all that difficult. Took only a few minutes.


gradient_points_2020May14a.gh (24.3 KB)

Here’s a different method, simpler, perhaps easier to adapt to Python?


gradient_points_2020May14b.gh (13.0 KB)