Using the rhino "bounce" command in grasshopper

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Permalink Reply by David Rutten on May 17, 2010 at 1:26am

Hi Thomas,

I don't think so. Using Rhino commands from within Grasshopper is notoriously difficult (much harder than using Rhino SDK functions), as it involves you temporarily baking geometry, making sure the selection is set up correctly, calling commands with all the formatted options, then somehow figuring out which geometry was added by the command, reading that geometry back in and finally deleting all the gunk you added to the document.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
London, UK

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Permalink Reply by Thomas Rusling on May 17, 2010 at 1:56am

Thank you for your reply David

I get that it would be difficult to have a back and forth between grasshopper and rhino, but wouldn't it be possible to create a grasshopper nod that take the same parameters as the bounce command; a/some reflective(s) surface(s), a starting point and a vector. For short, I would be taking the code behind the rhino bounce command and translating it to a VB nod.
In this manner, grasshopper wouldn't need to communicate with rhino.
Anyway, it sounds difficult and I'm not sure if I have time to learn enough Vb in a week to do this.

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Permalink Reply by David Rutten on May 17, 2010 at 2:00am

Depending on how much of Bounce is exposed in the SDK that would range from "trivial" to "daunting".

I'll ask for a proper RhinoCommon SDK exposure of this function so we can add a native Bounce component.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
London, UK

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Permalink Reply by Thomas Rusling on May 17, 2010 at 1:34pm

Oh wow this would be really great
I'm really thankful that you've taken in interest to my problem, and I've gotta say that grace hopper as really changed the way I work around a problem.
Once again, thank you.

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Permalink Reply by DWIGHT DAVY on November 4, 2010 at 11:52pm

Greetings All

I've been looking for a similar 'bounce' solution to simulate daylight rays etc..
I came across this url:

http://simonkallioinen.wordpress.com/2010/04/10/bouncing-rhinoscript/

It has an interesting rhinoscript which generate rays from a source grid of points to a direction grid of points. Unfortunately each source point wants to connect to each directional point.

Can someone explain how to modify this script so that point A1 (source) would only connect to point A1 (directional)?

Thanks in advance

Dwight

Attachments:

• BounceMuliple.rvb, 3 KB

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Permalink Reply by Peter Adams on November 17, 2010 at 1:00pm

I'm not much of a rhino scripter, but I think this should do it. I just took out the nested loop. Now for each direction point (1st, 2nd, etc), the script looks for a corresponding point in the array of "center" points. It does its ray thing then it goes to the next direction point without cross referencing the points. I think this will break if there are not a matching number of points. Also, make sure they are selected / ordered in a corresponding manner.

Have fun.

Attachments:

• REFLECTOR_SCRIPT_1to1.rvb, 2 KB

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Permalink Reply by Peter Adams on November 17, 2010 at 1:20pm

David,
Any word on the Bounce SDK?

In lieu of such, any hints on how I could start doing such a crazy thing as having a grasshopper VB component do what you were talking about. I'm familliar with having GH VB bake objects, but I have no idea how to make it do the equivallent of Call Rhino.Command("selLast") or then telling Grasshopper to re-reference the selected geometry.

Thanks,
Peter

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