In one of the jewellery plugins that I have to leave behind in Rhino 5 Windows as I make my way to R7 on the Mac, there is a copy feature that I am going to need to replace natively in R7 as best I can.
The plugin creates mesh objects that it labels within Rhino as “gems”. The plugin allows me to copy objects based on the location of one gem to other gems. Is there something similar I can do natively in Rhino or is using Blocks going to be my closest option? TIA
cheers,
Sochin
Hi Sochin -
There is nothing natively like that and, based on the short description, I don’t see how blocks will help. Perhaps you can clarify with a sample?
-wim
Hi @wim, Thank you for your time. If I have a design that uses the same setting for multiple gems I create it around one gem like this.
Then I can arrange my gems as desired…
…and the plugin allows me to copy from the source gem to the other games whatever I select…in this case the setting.
Often I will do an edit of the original item, delete the others and then quickly copy it to the gems again.
I was thinking my closest option might be to create a block of the gem and setting or whatever and then use native Rhino tools to finish the layout like array, distribute etc on instances of the block. …which the more I think about it might be a better workflow.
Have I misunderstood how a block works? I must admit it has been years since I looked at them.
I think when I looked at blocks many years ago that I discovered you could not use tSpline objects in them which was a killer for me. I assume you can use Rhino SubD objects in blocks?
cheers,
Sochin
Hi Sochin -
Yes, that sounds doable. You can place the gems where you need them and model the rest around an instance of that gem at, e.g., the origin. When you’re done with the rest, you can copy it to the clipboard, enter block edit mode, and paste the geometry into the block. When you exit, the other block instances will be updated. You can also duplicate a block definition, and create different versions. You can then replace selected instances of simple gem blocks with any of those versions.
-wim
Thanks a heap @wim, that gives me a direction to work forward on and learn up. R5 used to get bogged down with a lot of duplicated tSplines objects especially if they had symmetry applied to them. That is why I think I initially explored using tSpline objects in blocks years ago.
Hopefully using native R7 SubD in blocks will give me much better performance. Thanks again.
cheers,
Sochin
