What causes the Offset Curve component to fail?

[andreaw (andrea)]

I’m trying to use the offset curve component as a stand-in for Illustrator’s “outline stroke” essentially. I got all the curves from the Rhino doc using the Geometry pipeline component (I disconnected it because I internalized the curves in the file I attached below).

For some reason it’s telling me “Solution Exception: Value cannot be null,” even though when I plug the curves into a panel you can see that they are just regular curves.

What could be the issue? Is there a better way to get the outline of a curve?
offset_curve_fail.gh (51.1 KB)

[Joseph_Oster]

I don’t have Pufferfish but, while it appears to be a 3D drawing, all your curves are in the XY plane Does that make any sense? Maybe Scale would work better?

[andreaw (andrea)]

Sorry, I’m not sure what you mean. It’s not a 3D model, it’s just a 2D line drawing. I don’t know what scale would do, as I am essentially trying to achieve something like this for each of the curves in the drawing:

[Joseph_Oster]

@andreaw

I don’t know what scale would do

See image attached to previous post.

[andreaw (andrea)]

Thanks for trying, but I think my question has been misunderstood. I’m not trying to scale the curves together, I am trying to create a boundary shape from each curve. The end goal is to create a binary image mask for each curve:

In other words, each curve is begin given a thickness and turned into something like a surface, which has area:

[Joseph_Oster]

[andreaw (andrea)]

Thanks, I also considered using multi-pipe and pipe with MeshOutline, but it seems like needlessly computationally expensive solution and as you can see it does create some odd results with the extended lines.

I mean, I guess one other way to do 2D pipe is to create a perpendicular curve and sweep along each curve, but I don’t know if that’s the best solution either as it doesn’t produce rounded caps easily.

Rhino 8 Feature: Linetype Enhancements

Thanks! Nice feature. Is there a way to extract geometry (surfaces) from the tapered linetypes?

It does seem like there is a test command called TestCurveOutline, but it produces something of a different size than I need, plus it’s approximated by polylines.

[andreaw (andrea)]

For anyone who is interested in the solution, I figured out the problem; it’s because sometimes the curves are way too small or way too short.

I solved the problem by filtering out anything within a certain length:

[Joseph_Oster]

Not bad.

Oops. I forgot to save the GH file in the image.