Replicator guides

#1

Hello, I am alessio, an italian student of architecture (Sorry for the English, please forgive my mistakes). I am trying to insert some parametric surfaces into dynamo, but I have some problems with the replicator guides. I do not understand exactly how they work.

Here there is a file where the behaviour of the replicators is a bit strange. Perhaps I do not use the right method to do these things. In particular in the third case, one needs to use the replicator always in couple “<1> and <2>”. ReplicatorBehaviour

Capture_3

Here a dyn of a parametric surface example.

parametricSurfacesES13

#2

Hi,

It is interesting your development of surfaces from a pure mathematical definition

The normal use of replication guides is when you have “something” (a built method, a custom function) that take arguments. And you are feeding the arguments with lists. So the replication guides allow you to define how the lists will be combined. You can find a good explanation and sample here:
http://dynamobim.org/cbns-for-dummies/

Using them directly in mathematical expressions, when feeding the integers vars with lists is a bit unusual for me, but interesting. I don’t have experience on this, but I have the feeling that maybe currently there are some limitations. And you can not use the replication guides as freely as with arguments. It seems that you need a clear and somehow “symmetrical” replication guides in both sides of every mathematical operator
02

But if you make a custom function it will take perfectly every combination you want. This is the “normal” use of the replication guides
01

If it is working in the function, probably it is possible that it works directly without having to define the custom function. So please, post this as an issue in the developers github site


Maybe we will get some insights about what is going on. And maybe some improvements too.

#3

It seems that this thread is having a parallel life. And one of the developers has answered there already…

#4

Sorry for the double posts. Can you please merge them? I have posted it a first time but then I saw that it did no appear on the forum, so I posted it for a second time. But now I see that both of them are on line, once again I am sorry!

Thank you, I think that by using a function could be the better solution. Do you think that I should post on Github also after the answer of “Yu Ke” in the other thread?

I found this method in the book “Inside SmartGeometry”, in the article of Chris Williams. He talks also about the similar mathematical properties of Curvature and Stress tensor.

#5

hey,

There are some threads always in the beginning from members of the team that are moderators of this forum. Maybe they can merge the two posts in one.

Now that Yu-ke have explained us what happened, it is up to you to ask for an improvement in github (more flexibility in using directly replication guides with mathematical operators in code block nodes) . Certainly you can manage this using functions. But It would be nice if it would work directly, no?.

Anyway, you are not losing anything for asking…