I’m currently working on a project for which we use Rhinoceros to model a large quantity of architectural study cases. Projects are being remodeled quite precisely, and now comes the time to output them as drawings.
Most of our output is axonometric drawing that we want to work as vectors. The current process involves :
Make2D in isometric view (and rescaling it)
Cleaning the Make2D, checking if some stuff were not rendered properly
Coloring the 2D drawing with hatches
Coloring the drawing takes a huuuuge amount of time, especially since we’re differentiating the faces from their orientation (see images below), in order to color them with different colors in Illustrator later (this part in Illustrator has been scripted, so at least we’re gaining time on that afterwards).
My question is the following : how hard would that be to automate this action? What I have in mind would be a kind of Make2D that transforms surfaces into hatches.
Let me know if something is unclear, and thank you in advance for the input you can provide!
Depending on the programs your office uses you can export a Make2D as an Adobe Illustrator file, and then use the Live Paint tool to add hatches quickly. This also allows you to add shadows, custom swatches with hatches, and other creative features to your conceptual model. I have attached an image that used Make2D and the live paint tool in illustrator.
That specific request is not on the list - a request to have hatches in the input geometry also be included in the Make2D output result is (RH-11083).
A different way to achieve your goal would require that Make2D produces closed polycurves for each surface in the scene. We have that request on the list as RH-43678.
@wim Thank you for your answer, the request RH-43678 is close to what I’m looking for, or at least could be a beginning to script on it.
@nsmorin Thanks, I knew this tool on Illustrator, but in my opinion the Hatch tool in Rhino is more powerful than Illustrator’s Live Paint Tool (it runs faster, and doesn’t group everything the way Illustrator does). For a few illustrations it’s working well, but when it comes to hundreds of drawings, automation needs to be developed
@wim I agree it would accelerate our workflows a lot to get polycurves out of Make2D ! Most of the time, I end up rejoining everything by hand anyway. Though I don’t know how would that work out with all the unclean lines that come out of Make2D…
@antoine3, in the meantime, you could use this small script to extract faces from Breps and arrange them by orientation. Using object attributes or even with vectorization later on illustrator, it kinda does the trick…
