can i find the second closest point?

Within a group of points, I want to select one of these points and find the nearest point to this point. I can't get the 'closest point' command to work since I am using a point from the group of points as the point to search from. It always comes up with a distance of 0. Is there a way to find the second closest point which would solve this problem? Let me know if this is not clear

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on February 26, 2010 at 4:03pm

Sort by distance, then get the second item from the list. You may even consider culling all distance=zero results, in case you have more than 2 coincidents points.

You could also use the Proximity3D component and use a very small minimum distance (something like 1e-12) and a group size of 1.

The Proximity component has been highly optimised to search a 3D point-space, but it treats the entire point-set as a single operation, so you may have troubles extracting the data.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by Alex Hogrefe on February 26, 2010 at 4:53pm

will this work if I am trying to find the nearest point for all the points in the group, not just one (I misspoke earlier). Perhaps I am going about this all wrong. I have a set of lines different distances apart in the z direction. I want to copy the points that make up the lines in the x direction based on there distance apart. then loft and have different width louvers again based on the spacing in the z direction.