Tapering flat with grasshopper

Grasshopper
#1

i am trying to understand the taper component and as an example taper a mesh box. the axis has its origin in the center of the box base and is pointing to worldY.
tapering should be one-directional and one-dimensional, therefore i switch on the “flat” option, which works so far. now the tapering is performed in the worldZ direction and i can´t find a possibility to switch this to worldY. am i missing something?
another issue is the increase of the taper. it seems to be some kind of logarithmic which gives the box an s-shaped top surface from the side view. i wish to have a linear increase, the box should look like a simple wedge.
any hints? thanks in advance!!

ss04
ss041162×449 27.3 KB

taper.gh (12.6 KB)

#2

toggling “infinite” to True will give you a linear increase:

image
image1564×514 197 KB

while using a different base plane (custom ones as well) will taper the geometry along the chosen axis:

image
image1708×541 215 KB

#3

good morning and thanks a lot for the quick help!

i find it hard to see what “infinite” exactly does here, especially as my axis goes through the whole object anyway.
so @developer(s): maybe some hint about changing the tapering increase shape when hovering over would be helpful.

#4

there seem to be some strange things in the taper component.

the above example only works, if the deformed mesh resides in the world center (0,0,0)
i made some tests with a referenced mesh box which was moved outside the world center. then i used a bounding box and a point component to put the start of the taper axis where i think it should be and attached a worldXY-plane and a worldYZ-plane to this start point (the planes are visualised via circles). at last i generated axes from these two different planes and used these axes for the taper. allthough the two axes are in two different planes, they give the same result (THE TAPERING SHOULD BE VISIBLE IN TOP VIEW, top and bottom of the meshbox should stay parallel to worldXY, the two smaller sides should stay parallel to worldXZ)

another thing, that seems unlogical to me:
altering the length of the taper axis changes the tapering strength, even though “infinite” is set to true (mouseover says: “If true, the deformation happens throughout the geometry, even if the axis is shorter. If false, the deformation takes place only the length of the axis.”)

ss01
ss011263×568 72.7 KB

taper2.gh (25.5 KB)

#5

in my previous reply I used XY YZ XZ planes because your method for generating the taper axis was using base planes

image
image1545×481 201 KB

but an axis is just a line, so whatever method you use to generate it, will always be ok

of course, two identycal lines -despite being generated in different ways- will produce exaclty the same result

#6

hmm, strange…
so as there is no parameter input for which plane to perform the taper in when switching to “flat”, how can you determin to do the flat taper to the “sides” and not to “top” direction ??
in 3dsmax for example i have one setting for taper axis and another one for the affected plane.

#7

I agree with you, it is weird when you chose flat taper you are not allowed to chose which side you want to be flat

here is a simple thing with unit xyz vectors to see how the flattening behaves

image
image1272×699 60.1 KB

if anyone knows more about this I’d be happy to be taught :slight_smile:

I have also tried to rotate each geometry 90° in every possible direction, nothing changes: it looks like the flattened side is predetermined depending solely and entirely on the axis-line orientation

Taper_xyz.gh (12.1 KB)