Lets say I have a flowing/curved surface and I want to orient a some (large quantity) high density mesh geometry onto it. This mesh is the same for every instance so making it a block would help reduce file size. Is there a way to use grasshopper to orient this mesh as a block? For my purposes, usin…

I believe there are some plugins for GH that deal with Blocks, but Grasshopper itself does not. It would be fairly easy to write a C# script which takes a block name and bunch of planes, and then creates copies of that block at each plane orientation. Would that work for you?

[image] blockinsert.gh (12.3 KB) blockfile.3dm (1.8 MB)

Thanks for the suggestion, but the example I gave was merely to convey my need for blocks. I am not necessarily orienting meshes onto a surface. What I would like is populate a model with blocks via grasshopper’s orient component and then bake them into existence (where position and rotation may be …

That C# component might work. So I insert block name, plane and toggle boolean to bake?

Yup. Note that it takes a list of planes in one go, so if you want to match up a list of different block each with their own orientation, you need to make sure to graft both the Block and Planes input.

Thanks, the script works. I might try to convert it to python since that is my language of choice. But essentially, you use the block name to load the block into def, then you make a transform object with the planes, and finally add it to Rhino while referencing the transform object. What I might t…

Yeah that’s the basic gist of it. I wasn’t entirely sure whether Block plane are always WorldXY or whether an InstanceDefinition can have it’s own orientation, but since I couldn’t find any methods for getting a custom plane I figured all blocks are ‘positioned’ on WorldXY. Of course if you want a …

So I finally got around to doing my own version of the script in python. I’ve never reference things from the Rhino document or bake things directly into Rhino, so I hit a road block right at the start of your script: InstanceDefinition def = RhinoDocument.InstanceDefinitions.Find(Block, true); I …

I found this page: http://developer.rhino3d.com/samples/rhinocommon/createblock/ Unfortunately when I do scriptcontext.doc there is no method InstanceDefinitions

Grasshopper + Blocks + Materials

Grasshopper

DavidRutten (David Rutten) November 16, 2019, 6:54pm 15

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Grasshopper + Blocks + Materials

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