A nifty little tool for creating connectors between pretty much any kind of planar surfaces which intersect themselves at the edges.

What it basically does is to output in a ordered structure the intersecting faces (as tree branches) and their intersection line. From there on you can continue to build up your own connectors however you like.

The example file contains the Grasshopper definition, Connector-Notch Script and an example Rhino file. Read below for more.

The workflow is as follows:

1. Select the faces you want to make the connectors for and input them into the Grasshopper definition.
2. Bake on separate layers the offset faces and the connectors.
3. Run the script provided and provide the necessary inputs in the correct order (connectors, faces and material thickness).
4. Enjoy.

Troubleshooting:

There will be errors. They always are. Here’s how and where to look for them:

• Faces might actually not intersect, even if they seem so. To check, manually select the faces causing problems and use Rhino to detect their intersection (type intersect). Sometimes things are not as it seems.
• If the radius of a connector exceeds the faces’s size, the script will go berserk. Try reducing the connector radius and things should start looking up. You can also improve the script to use adaptive connector radii in respect with the face size.
• If the material thickness is too big or too small, geometry will start crashing.
• Cull faces which are too small – you might have a little face somewhere which is 0.0004 m^2 and causing problems.
• Check the units you’re working on. The definition’s parameters are set for meters.
• Otherwise, you can email me. Take note that this is a free, spare-time, no-guarantee, as-is service – don’t send me three emails just in case i didn’t get the first one

Download: 110615 SuperConnect.zip (2.21 mb)

SuperConnect working in real-life (spoiler for the future)

Grasshopper’s scripting capabilites are now a huge super cool feature, especially if you’re coding in visual studio (c#) and then pasting the shit or making dlls. I did this some time ago when i suddenly realized that you can declare your own static variables inside scripting nodes (and these guys hold up their values during the updating procedure). And the vector math is already there too.

This is an implementation based on Craig Reynolds‘s neurons, and a little bit on Daniel Shiffman’s processing example (which was updated and used some time ago for this.

Now, if somebody will be nice and implement some collision detection…

PS: I will upload the def. soonish (i have to clean it up a bit first). Ok i didn’t clean it up; here’s the link.

Here’s a new 10 day link: http://dl.transfer.ro/boidsT-Transfer_RO-16Nov-ad56f6.zip

Final link, stable and sound: http://improved.ro/Grasshopper/boidsTCAV.zip