I'm an architect and archviz-guy (archicad+twinmotion+photoshop). recently i got into blender to extend on my knowledge and realize more complex structures. unfortunately even after searching the net and forums i hit a brick wall.
- what i want to do:
starting with primitives like cylinders or cubes or a combination of both that serve as a building mockup for a possible architectural draft, i want to distribute cubes (read: planks) along their "facades", meaning their sides without the caps. now for the difficult part: those planks should change rotation and length along with the changes i make to let's say the cylinder. example: i rotate the upper cap of the cylinder and scale it along one axis, making it an ellipse. so now i have a geometry with a circle at the bottom and an angled ellipse at the top. the planks should have followed the changes. i know, nice project for a beginner.
- what i have tried so far:
a) boy, oh boy. i started with a geometry node on the cylinder, making a dummy cube the instance and putting it on the faces of the cylinder with its normal controlling the cube's alignment in their local z-direction. somehow the planks (cube instances) never have the right alignment. also the deformation of the cylinder doesn't affect the instances the way i would like them to. i fiddled around for days but to no avail - the nodes functions still elude me for the most part. also aligning instances on faces seems to be the wrong approach since they always "start" in the middle of a face, leaving their top and bottom part with a pre-defined, static length. making a vertex group and doing it from vertices still doesn't solve the length issue. ideally i would want to tell the program "take the upper and lower vertex/edge of this geometry and connect them with a line that "somehow becomes" a cube lol.
b) next i tried my luck with curves, parenting the cube to a plane that follows an array along a curve. so far so good. but there would be an upper and a lower curve (bottom and top of the house) that need to be connected by the array-ed cubes.
c) my thoughts on how to do this would be that i have two (completely arbitrary) curves with ready made cube-children on plane-parents. those two independent groups of chilren must somehow face each other and -by proximity- merge with each other like a metaball. geometry nodes come to mind: if i could just make two cubes "extend/extrude" themselves when reaching a certain proximity OR always extend until they touch, then maybe i could pull this off?
You see, i have a long road ahead of me but i would be grateful for some hints. maybe i'm doing everything backwards or in a complicated, stupid way. maybe there's the perfect addon i have overseen?
thanks for reading this novel. have a potato.
Here is what i want to do: