Extract: San Francisco

Midnight creeps into my dreams tonight

Spatial Deform: Grasshopper Introduction

Rhino's CageEdit command's closest equivalent in grasshopper is Spatial Deform. The combination of an already powerful command with grasshopper's interactive nature makes this a very complicated and memory intensive tool to figure out and use. Other than this Q&A and this demo, I really can't find a good example of using Spatial Deform, so here goes a basic introduction:

To use Spatial Deform, you'll need to attach the following:

'G' - the rhino geometry to deform

'S' - a series of points that will define the cage

'F' - the forces applied to each of the points in 'S'

'f' - a falloff equation

Now this script takes advantage of Kangaroo's removeDuplicatePts. If you don't already have it, get it at their website.

Spatial Deformation.gh
Spatial Deformation.3dm example
(links updated 9.18.2013)

Match Cage Edit + FlowAlongSrf

Part 2 of the MatchCageEdit series shows how I can combine the script with rhino's FlowAlongSrf as a rough and quick paneling design tool. In many regards it is similar to a grasshopper CageEdit, but allows for easier manipulation.

Match Cage Edit

MatchCageEdit.rvb

This is Part 1 of a three part exploration into Rhino's CageEdit and Cage commands.

In Rhino, I frequently use cage editing for sloppy massing control. However, it has the ability to become a powerful and accurate design tool if there was a bit more workflow control. Imagine if you were working on developing a two-piece composition with cage editing, and then you've decided that it really needed three pieces. How would you add another object to cage? What you would need to do is to start over with a new cage and slowly deforming the control points until it looks like the previous control/cage. Ugh!

The actual steps to rebuild a deformed cage is simple but tedious. That's why here is a script in the same vein as MatchProperties or MatchLayer:

MatchCageEdit.rvb (change .txt to .rvb)