At wits end trying to create notched surfaces-halp?

Hey all! Long time lurker, this is my first post here~

I've been using Grasshopper for a bit, and it seems that I've inadvertently stumbled onto something rather hard. Or, perhaps I'm just not looking at things the right way.

I'm making this sculpture out of many laser cut cards, all at funny angles to each other. I'd like to notch the intersections between the cards, so they fit nicely. I'd gotten things mostly together by ignoring the thickness of the material, but the cards bowed at angles as things moved away from 90 degrees. (I've attached a photo that shows this bowing)

I'd like to find the intersection at the top of the material, and the bottom of the material, and then combine them into a single intersection that can be cut with a laser, and won't get in the way. I've managed to get it sort-of working, but it's the worst patching I've ever done/seen in my life, and it breaks if the angle is off past 90 degress by much. I get two separate notches instead of one combined one. I'm also pretty certain that I'm going about this in the most circuitous possible way.

I've gone ahead and attached a stripped down model, and the terrible notching code. Way on the left, there's a material thickness, which is always .055", and then a spot to select two surfaces. The Card A+C work great, but B+C or A+B end up with broken notches. Might anyone be able to help me find my way here?

Thanks!

~nicole

Attachments:

card notch test.3dm, 59 KB
photo (2).JPG, 577 KB

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Nicole Aptekar on August 20, 2012 at 1:25pm

Durr, failed to upload the grasshopper patch. Here we are~

Attachments:

two card notch.gh, 38 KB

Permalink Reply by Nicole Aptekar on August 20, 2012 at 3:29pm

Realizing that the most important piece of help that I'm looking for might be unclear. If I have two rectangles along the same plane, how would I go about making a rectangle that includes both of them on that plane?

Currently, I'm producing two rectangle curves, for the upper and lower notch, and I had assumed they would intersect. Since they aren't doing so, I'm a little confused how to get their extents and make a new notch.

Permalink Reply by Arlen Abraham on August 20, 2012 at 3:38pm

Can you attach a screen shot of this? I'm a little confused as to what's being projected where.

Permalink Reply by Nicole Aptekar on August 20, 2012 at 3:41pm

Sure~ I've got the upper and lower notch projected back onto the original surface here. Two green rectangles. I'm looking to make one rectangle out of them.

Attachments:

two notches.jpg, 215 KB

Permalink Reply by Rhydro on August 21, 2012 at 2:07am

Hi Nicole,

I haven't totally understood your explanation, but if what you want is to encompass 2 rectangles that have the same orientation into one big rectangle, my approach would be to use the BoundingBox component, specifying a plane which X and Y coordinates would be the edges of one of the rectangles.