Working with Heavy (Repeated) Geometry

Hey all.

Long time troll, first time poster here.

I'm working on a project that puts a ton of breps onto a surface, moves them about, rotates them, etc.

But he kicker is that I'm dealing with thousands of these and I'm hitting the wall on my computer.

Since they're all based off of 3 different size geometries (the octagon) is there a way that I can "instance" them into the file, so as to make it a ton lighter? I'm thinking something akin to Vray Scatter or Multiscatter, but with geometry that I can see in the file.

Bonus points if I'm able to trim this geometry within Rhino.

Check out the pics.

I've only been able to finish half of the octagons due to the sheer volume of them.

Thanks.

Attachments:

Torture4.png, 231 KB
Torture14.png, 571 KB

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on November 22, 2010 at 1:24pm

Nope, Grasshopper doesn't support instancing a la Blocks in Rhino. It seems you might approach this with a circumspect way though. Instead of creating the Octagons in Grasshopper, you could try creating lightweight objects that contain all translation+scaling+rotation data, for example Polyline octagons. These should take much less memory so you can populate your surfaces with these polylines.

Then when you're happy with the result, you can bake these polylines and then run a RhinoScript or .NET component to replace the polylines with Blocks.

I suppose you don't have access to a 64-bit machine and Rhino5 64-bit?

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Seattle, WA

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