Using vvvv for rapid prototyping

vvvv beta general
1

I wanna use v4 for rapid prototyping like a lot people do with processing. therefor several tasks have to be done:

a. combine different primitives to one object (adding 2 together, cutting one from the other … it’s called csg) … I think that’s the most of the work?! luckily a friend of mine (Christian Riekoff build a library for processing for that and I can have a look at his code)
b. cut the object into different slices (maybe with the GoochCutTrough Shader?!) to have material for lasercutting
c. export the slice contours as svg (ok, for that i could use the svg exporter from milo)

I use vvvv now since a while but never thought about a task like that, I would really love to use v4 instead of processing/java for this but need now some help where to begin. maybe somebody of you can point me to some exercises where to look at first and what the basics are.

p.s.: I did a gnerative sculpture with vvvv in the past but that was more a hack because i exported printed outlines and vectorized them in illustrator which was a lot of work.

2

before getting into the heavy math of CSG, i would try to achieve the same results by clever use of culling, blending & the depthbuffer (instead of csg) and moving the ‘near plane’ pin on the Perspective (Transform) (to render contours for lasercutting). after all, you don’t really need the geometry, you only need the images for lasercutting; i believe you could trick your way there without csg.

3

yeah I’m aware of that “tricky” way - already used it for a papersculture I made - but thats not the clean way. At the moment I’m thinking that it would be the best way to export the figures and do the csg stuff there. anyway would be nice to have that feature :)

4

perhaps using 3d editors will be easier. I have made some test very concluent with wings3d that exports in X.
quick easy, and no math for cg .