T-Splines and Grasshopper - useful together?

So, I'm a developer for T-Splines. I've been looking at Grasshopper to see how T-Splines and Grasshopper can be used together. One simple way I've seen them used together is to panel T-Splines on surfaces.

I also made a quick test that takes in a Mesh and converts it to a smooth brep. There's an example video here: http://screencast.com/t/MTA0MTRmMTkt

Most grasshopper techniques I've seen concentrate on using surfaces and parameter space, and breps are much harder to use there. The breps we output are not trimmed, so they have that going for them.

I guess my question is whether it would be useful to release something like this, or if breps are not very useful for further construction, in which case you could just bake the mesh and do a single conversion using our existing command once the mesh looks good.

More long term, it seems like adding mesh modeling tools like extrude face, thicken, weld, etc. with appropriate inputs might make it possible to do some interesting branching designs. I've held off on things like that so far because David Rutten says that the SDK is still being changed so much, and because I'm not sure how useful it would be.

Is this kind of integration useful?

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Thanks for all the supportive feedback. I ended up making the component shown in the video available on the T-Splines forum. Please let me know either here or there if there what you think of it, suggestions, etc.

Thanks

Tags: tsplines

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Permalink Reply by Wieland Schmidt on July 16, 2010 at 1:02am

Hi Tom, will there be a T-Splines component Grasshopper 0.7?

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Permalink Reply by Tom Finnigan on August 20, 2010 at 5:42pm

Finally got to update the component to Grasshopper 0.7. Sorry for the delay. It's available on the t-splines forum, linked from the original post.

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Permalink Reply by Philipp on August 21, 2010 at 4:18am

WOW this is really cool!
But I have a problem with it - after i Baked it t-splines plugin dont want to modify it (to select faces, points, etc)
what i have to do?

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Permalink Reply by Tom Finnigan on August 21, 2010 at 8:57am

I haven't figured out how to send tsplines through grasshopper, so the component just outputs a brep. If you want to do further editing, you can bake the input mesh instead and use tsConvert/tsSmoothToggle.

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Permalink Reply by robert cervellione on May 1, 2010 at 4:55pm

definitely useful. i would love to see a component that can take a face and a vector for extrusion. as you said it would open up a lot of possibilities for branching and other similar things.