I have a model for an upcoming sculpture. The pieces will all be waterjet-cut from aluminum plate. What I now need to do is to create a pattern .DWG that I can send to the waterjet guys.
In the linked image, 99% of the ~160 surface panels are planar, although a handful will need to be hand-warped ever so slightly during construction. (This will not be a problem, but might affect the main question of this topic.) If necessary, I can manually transform the warped panels.
What I’d like to be able to do is to use Grasshopper to take each of the surface panels, orient them to the World Top CPlane, so that the “outside” surface points up, and spread them out so that they’re not all overlapping.
Two final considerations—1) Each surface panel is actually a group that contains the surface panel as well as 3-8 short lines that will also get waterjet cut into the panel. And 2) I’ve written a total of two, very simple, Grasshopper scripts!
Thanks, in advance, for any help/suggestions you can offer.
Thanks for your suggestion. I tried this script, and I think I see what it’s doing, which is to unroll each of the panels as though each face of each panel was to be cut out of a paper-thin material:
Unfortunately, this isn’t what I seek to do. What I’d like to be able to do is to orient each “group”—consisting of the polysurface and a handful of line segments—to the World Top CPlane, so that the “outside” surface points up, and spread them out so that they’re not all overlapping.
Each group will still be a group. But it will be rotated such that the face on the outside of the bird will be pointing up in the World Z direction.
OK, let me see if I can do a better job of describing my problem. As shown in my original post, I have a Rhino model for a portion of an upcoming sculpture—in this case, it’s a 12’ high x 23’ long crow, to be manufactured from a couple of hundred waterjet-cut aluminum plates.
The Attached .3DM file is a simplified illustration of what I’m trying to achieve.
On the left in the image, you can see the starting conditions:
Three groups, each of which consists of a red, named (“L01,” “L02,” & “L03”) plate and a couple of orange lines.
A point element denoting the interior of the sculpture. I included this point thinking it might be of use in figuring out which plate surface is considered the “inside” surface.
On the right in the image, you can see what I need to achieve:
Each group oriented so that the “interior” surface of each red plate aligns with the World CPlane.
I don’t care which edge of each group aligns to the “X” direction
A text element showing the name of each red plate.
Thanks, in advance for your help and/or suggestions.
