Hi there,
I’m trying to create ‘extruded’ version of Tyler Hobbs flow lines drawings that could be built from some kind of sheet material like MDF/ metal, etc…

Tyler gives very detailed description of how to do it but it’s all done with coding. Flow Fields — Tyler Hobbs
https://tylerxhobbs.com/essays/2020/flow-fields
As I’m not familiar with Phyton I was trying to achieve similar effect with grasshopper components.
I’ve managed to replace long curvy flow lines with short rectangles (20mm long by 4mm thick) which can be extruded in Z direction but there are few other issues I need to resolve:
- Overlapping of elements – as I’m planning to laser cut the flaps from plywood or plexiglass I can’t have any overlapping elements.
- Is there a way of specifying min distance between two elements so that it’s possible to laser cut the holes.
- It’s probably too much, but I was thinking that maybe it would also be possible to have various flap lengths depending on curvature. Say whenever there is a sharp turn and shorter flaps would be needed, we could have 20-40mm flaps (blue ones), than red ones and for longer straight lines flaps could go up to 70-100mm in length (yellow ones) …
Thanks in advance for all your help.
fields_min distance.3dm (35.3 KB)