VisualARQ railing style

[P_G (Petru Gangura)]

Hi, I’m trying to create visualarq railing style. To be honest I’m still a bit confused when it comes to the proper creation of styles. So i tried creating a glass rail style without it being to complicated (since its the 1st style creation). I dont understand why, when using the railing style I created, nothing is being created…
Railing-glass-baluster-mm.gh (19.1 KB)

[alfmelbev (Alfonso Melero Beviá)]

Hi @P_G,

I have been trying it and it created the railing. However, depending on which curve I take as a balauster, the Grasshopper definition creates some strange results. Which curve are you taking? How does it look like? Where are you placing it? Does it need to be placed aligned with any specific axis?

[P_G (Petru Gangura)]

Hi @alfmelbev
As you can see in the screenshot, the curve isn’t complex by any means , just a polyline without any rounded parts. Here’s what i want the style to look like more or less. basically just interrupted glass panels.

[alfmelbev (Alfonso Melero Beviá)]

Hi @P_G,

Please, send me the curves you are using. If I apply just random curves in your Grasshopper definition I get weird results:

I need to check if with this Grasshopper definition you get the same result when you create the style.

I have made a different Grasshopper definition which I think will work for this case:
Glass railing.gh (9.5 KB)

[arcus (Thomas Hardy)]

I would guess your issue is with the Baluster curve input. I would create that curve completely within grasshopper using dimensional inputs and then orient it onto the divided curve points.

Also, it generally seems to be a good idea to avoid the boolean components like “Solid Difference”. They are really resource heavy and often crash for random reasons. Instead, you may want to Shatter the path curve and Extrude the intermediate curve (for curved glass) or make it a Polyline first and Shatter and Extrude (for flat glass).

[fsalla (Francesc Salla)]

@arcus

it generally seems to be a good idea to avoid the boolean components like “Solid Difference”. They are really resource heavy and often crash for random reasons

Hi Thomas, if you can reproduce any of these issues related to the “Solid difference” component, we will be glad to take a look and see what’s going on.

[arcus (Thomas Hardy)]

It’s not an issue with Visualarq at all. The grasshopper boolean commands in general seem to be very sensitive and have a lot of issues with plane orientation, unit tolerances, and overlapping surfaces. I often see comments in the forum where folks are having issues.

Having trouble getting Grasshopper's Solid Difference to work in some cases

If you bake the elements that you are trying to Boolean, and then try to do the Boolean in Rhino, does it work? If it doesn’t, the problem then is the core Rhino geometry engine. We find many situations in breps where definitions stop working because of this limitation. Mostly fillets and booleans, sometimes even trims. You can see if you can move the difficult areas away from the intersections of the different breps. I know this si not a good solution if you have to change the design to make i…

If it were a one-off script we could just go in there and fix the issue, but with a grasshopper style you wouldn’t want to go edit the script. If possible, I just avoid the boolean commands and create the element another way. However, I’m not an expert level grasshopper user.