I think a Yes/No for this could be helpful. Deafult to No would be fine. Current workaround can be using the thickness modifier to test out. But I think a preview offset would be nice, especially if it still honoured the thickness modifier on the preview of the offset. This is for upper panelling design and just trying to ‘layer’ things up, I’m using DeleteInput as standard here as well.
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We also could really use a grasshopper OffsetSubD component. This, combined with a simple script, would make it much easier offset subD objects and achieve a minimum thickness for the result.
Currently, the offset distance is for the control polygon, which means the subD will usually have a different and variable thickness, as opposed to a thickness that matches what’s chosen in _OffsetSubD.
That’s a very tricky thing for the coders at McNeel to fix, as I understand it, but with a ghosted preview and a guide object, one could get minimum thicknesses in Rhino, and with an OffsetSubD component and a deconstruct SubD component in grasshopper, one could measure between vertices and use a slider to confirm minimum thicknesses.
All necessary to use SubD effectively for fabrication.
I guess you’d have a loose/normal option for continuity with existing tools. Loose would be helpful in that you could kind of go back and forth a bit without losing anything, technically.
I had an exchange with one of the devs about this in a past thread and it all sounds like it’s rather difficult to get to work in the way that we’d intuitively want it to work. Similar issues with offsetSrf, too, which is quite unreliable in many situations.
Perhaps the workaround would be using the Thickness modifier without Solid ticked, and converting to SubD.
Would be cool to see what people could cook up.
Also, am I right in seeing there are only 4 SubD related components in Grasshopper?
A through point option and preview for OffsetSubD are filed as https://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/RH-59930
Regarding SubD in GH, I suggest using the control polygon and then mesh components before going back to SubD at the end. This has a number of benefits including speed of updates and a wide range of existing tools.
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It’s true that converting to mesh is a good option when working with SubD in grasshopper.
However I’ve found that native mesh components won’t quite get me where I want to go. Pufferfish has a few components that are very useful.
This post shows my first attempts to create workflows for modifying SubDs: SubD workflow examples for grasshopper: extrude, loft, offset. Also: Questions about creases
I’m not sure about other people’s progress, but my bottlenecks for working easily with SubDs in grasshopper are creases and face/edge ring selection.