how to project points to SURFACE not a plane?

Hi guys i have a set of points that i want to project to a curved surface on top of it. But the project geometry works for plane not surfaces, however project to surface is only available for curves not points.

I the long way of doing this is by drawing a plane right on top of the curvy surface, project the points to that plane, draw lines and then intersect these lines with the curvy surface, but this is too cumbersome, is there a fast way? i just wanna know

Thanks!

Best

Guan

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Permalink Reply by WT4 on May 23, 2010 at 2:31pm

Hi Guan

I was going to suggest joining the points with a polyline and then projecting the polyline onto the surface. However when I tried it with version 0.7, the project to surface component does not seem to work even with a smooth curve. Do not know whether it is a bug in 0.7.

Regards
William

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Permalink Reply by Andrew Heumann on May 23, 2010 at 3:08pm

As far as I know some version of the line-surface intersect method is necessary to do this. The one thing to know is that the lines do not have to intersect the surface for this component to work, so you're actually doing an unnecessary step: you can simply take your points as they are, move them all by the vector of projection, connect them with lines, and perform a line-surface intersect. There is no need to project them first to a plane just above the surface - this intersect component treats them as (infinite) lines, not line segments.