I was trying to find the “multi-slicing” angle that produces the least amount of parts on a sculpture, so I gave the angle slider as a gene to Galapagos, and the number of slices as a goal function to minimize.
Finally , I realize that I rather have a “big picture” view instead of just an optimal value.
So I tried to graph the number of slices over the angle value and found that I had to resort to a shameless hack :
This would be actually useful if I could have a feedback of intermediate values, but the “Quick graph” only gives the extremums.
Any plugin out there for graphs that would do a better job ?
Another workaround ? @DavidRutten : what’s in store for GH 2 in this field ?
After some thought : I might just generate and bake the graph as a Rhino polyline.
But sigh…
I output/baked this graph as a polylign, as well as another graph that gives me the smallest slice area for each angle.
This is important because I’m going to mill this thing and I don’t want to have to mill a tiny part, so the min. area has to be maximized.
Using these two graphs, I was able to spot the “sweet spot angles” that provide both few parts with none of them being smallish :
Hi Anders, and thanks for pointing me to Octopus, I’ll check that out.
It remains that better graphs would help analyse data in a way that can avoid optimisation alorithms pitfalls.
It can also be useful to present results to a client.
I see on David’s Youtube channel a lot of energy deployed in the area of color swatches and function graphs, which is all well and good, but not so much improvements in the way of data graphs.
I tend to simply use Grasshopper (or GHPython/RhinoCommon) for plotting, visualising, and further analysing graphs. While in Rome and such. That said, I do believe there are also a few Grasshopper plugins for at least the visualisation of data as graphs etc.
