I have a complicated object. I want to pull one end of it a certain distance in a certain direction, and have the changes drop off to zero at the other end, in such a way that tangents don’t change at the other end. The example shows what I am trying to do. The original object is the black rectangle. The red rectangle is what I want to produce. (Part of it is hidden by the black rectangle.)
The red line is what I am thinking of as a “control curve”. The deviation of that control curve from the black line below controls the distortion of the object (the rectangle).
Can I do this with “Flow along a curve”?
PS: I am using Rhino 4.0. Do I get a prize for “most ancient”?
“Flow along curve” does something similar to what I want, but not exactly. (I tried all the options.)
What needs to be done: Get all the control points of all the parts of the object. Move them as described by the control curve. (x and z don’t change; y changes …)
I will add one more comment, from recent experience: You need to be careful how you make those “surfaces”. If you make ‘em wrong, it looks like the surface you want, but it’s actually a trimmed surface, and the UV parameters don’t run all the way from 0 to 1 in both directions. You can check by looking at UV coordinates of points near the four corners of each surface.
