I tried the Extrude To Point component, but I need to extrude the curves away from the structure (starting from the point inside). Is there any way to do this?
It doesn’t look like there’s a component for that as such, but it would be almost exactly equivalent to scaling the curves relative to the point and then creating a loft between the original and scaled curves:
The Scale component’s Factor (F) input controls the distance and direction; a value greater than one will extrude away from the point, and a value less than one will extrude toward the point.
To generalise this to any number of input curves, you can for example use the Weave and Partition components, so that instead of feeding the Loft component a flat list of curves, you feed it a list of pairs of curves (set S=2 for the Partition component):
Bear in mind that the input here is a scale factor, not a linear distance:
- If you wanted to extrude by 500mm, you would have to convert that distance into a scale factor by measuring the distance from the point to the curve and doing some simple arithmetic
- And anyway, the width of the generated “ribbon” will not be constant, unless the curves lie on the surface of a sphere centered on the reference point. This is different to how other “extrude” operations behave.
- If you did need a constant-width “ribbon” that would be more complicated. I would suggest scaling by more than you need, then using “Offset On Srf” to offset the original curve on the Lofted surface, and then trimming the surface using the offset curve. I’m not sure it would work perfectly with complicated geometry though…
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