Rows of gradient radius holes to fill planar surfaces

[Joseph_Oster]

This project started in a different thread but soon took a different direction, having nothing to do with projecting curves onto breps or Python or attractor curves that affect circle radii.

Project Curve to Surface using Python

I don’t know what that means? Sounds like we are going in different directions so doesn’t matter. This has 48534 circles across 56 surfaces (~867 holes per surface). SrfSplit takes 48 seconds. [circles_2024Oct27b] [circles_2024Oct27b2] P.S. This doesn’t use an “attractor” like version ‘Oct26b’ yesterday. Instead, a slider (one per branch) chooses a reference edge. Doesn’t use isocurves either. In theory, it’s designed to work with any planar shape, though I haven’t tested that yet. T…

It took awhile to get data trees straightened out to work with any planar shape. This version has a Value List to switch between three sources of geometry. The third one is “Custom” to handle arbitrary geometry, to be defined. As a demo ten triangles are supplied (two branches of five). Other choices are ten hexagons (two branches of five) and 56 parallelograms at arbitrary orientations from the other thread (two branches of 28).

There are sliders for ‘Min_R ’ and ‘Max_R ’ (radius domain) and a slider for ‘Steps’ (rows) that must be adjusted depending on shape and size of the surfaces. A slider (one per branch) chooses a reference edge where rows of different radii begin. I added a ‘Reverse’ switch that inverts the rows because with triangles, there is no opposite edge to act as a reference.

SrfSplit is slow so should be disabled when exploring circle sizes, many holes and different shapes. Enable preview on the circles instead. 49.3 seconds for 56 panels (51,054 holes total, ~912 holes per panel), 2.8 seconds for 10 hexagons (5,430 holes total, 543 holes per hexagon) and 1.4 seconds for 10 triangles (rows reversed, 2,000 holes total, 200 per triangle).

circles_2024Oct28b.gh (63.0 KB)

This is less than half of the 56 parallelograms. zoomed in to see the holes.

[Joseph_Oster]

I’ve made extensive modifications to this code based on geometry found in this thread:

Circular perforations on faceted surface

Hi everybody, it looks like I am dealing with a data structure problem that is way beyond my present knowledge of GH. I’m trying here to have a regular grid of circular perforations on a set of triangular surfaces. The end goal is to be able to have precise control over the radius of the perforations and their distance from the edge of the triangular facets, as the final object is to be made in stainless steel. The process seems to work fine on an individual triangular surface, as in the attac…

More work is required to restore three sets of test geometry in the first post.

circles_2024Nov2b.gh (64.1 KB)

Because the 20 triangles in this version vary in size and shape, I decided to scale the circles to have the same number of rows in all surfaces. After that, some rows are culled if they are too short to have two or more circles.

P.S. SrfSplit is disabled in the red group labeled “SLOW” (bottom right). Enable it only when you have a circle pattern you like.

[Joseph_Oster]

Just for fun, I selected six polyhedra from code posted here:

Finding "normal" direction at intersection of a polyhedron

I am stunned that I didn’t post it two years ago but can’t find it on the forum RhinoPolyhedra_2022Oct17a.gh (42.0 KB) P.S. I see this when trying to run it in R8: [missing] So I tried ‘Download and Install’, perhaps for the first time, and get this: [missing2] I probably got it here but don’t see an R8 version? Paging Dale Fugier (@dale ?) P.P.S. They appear for me here in R7: [polyhedra]

And added them to the code posted above - no other changes!

Results are spectacular, all things considered.

circles_2024Nov2bb.gh (87.6 KB)

One of the issues at play is selection of a “base edge” (white group), where I sorted edges by the Z value of their edge mid-points, choosing the lowest edge. This was appropriate for the geometry used but that was a special case. Different methods for other geometry could be better.

P.S. I forgot to enable SrfSplit - all polyhedra (96 faces, 19544 holes) takes only 6.8 seconds.