curves on surface

I'm working on a tower project. Basically, there are vertical curves that 'waver' as they move up the tower - picking random points (within a set range) on my loft-surface isocurves. The end result is an 'organic' random cluster of tubes.... which I'm pretty satisfied with.

However, with a larger range of random values, these vertical curves pick points across the interior of the volume... which I want to avoid. I can get pretty good results if i keep the range low (as in the center version above), but I would like to be able to keep these curves on the original loft surface, leaving the interior open.

I tried using curve-on-surface but the data structures were throwing me off... and i tried generating the curves w/ interpolate rather than control pts, but it didn't make much difference.

I know I could do this in 2D, then take the resulting curves & flow-along surface in rhino, but I'd really like to get this working in 3D

any ideas?

Attachments:

GH Tower 03.ghx, 342 KB
GH Tower 03.3dm, 3.4 MB

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on April 22, 2010 at 3:56am

Curve on surface is the correct approach, but you'll need to supply UV points to interpolate, not 3D points. You should use Surface Closest Point to convert points from 3D space to surface UV space.

Morphing geometry onto a curved surface has the tendency to be (A) very slow and (B) create very dense control-points. If you can get away with interpolate-on-surface, you should go with that.

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

Permalink Reply by Danny Boyes on April 22, 2010 at 3:58am

Have you considered using the Geodesic Component to create extra points on the surface to help guide your curves around the tower? Curve>Spline>Geodesic

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on April 22, 2010 at 4:06am

But a geodesic only allows for two points, and there's no guarantee that two adjacent geodesics will be anything more than G0.

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

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