Hi folks, speckle-sharp/Objects/Objects/Geometry/Extrusion.cs at main · specklesystems/speckle-sharp · GitHub is marked as obsolete, but I can’t find a useful replacement. I think this would be very useful functionality to have for Automate, as defining a profile and a direction is easy to write abstractly if the desktop app can perform the extrusion on load.
Be good to understand the thinking as to why it’s obsolete, and let me know if there are alternatives we should be looking at.
Hi @chris.welch,
We don’t currently send extrusions in any connector, and haven’t for a while, and no connector is able to receive (except perhaps rhino, there is a function that exists, but since it hasn’t been part of our internal testing for more than a year, I wouldn’t rely on it working as expected)
Authoring geometry in Automate is an interesting use case, I’d love to hear more about what you’re trying to achieve.
When you’re doing geometry generation in the cloud you want to get the biggest bang for your buck from the smallest amount of geometry code, simply because of the complexity of working in the dark.
You can get very far with just extrusions.
If you look at Elements/Elements/src at master · hypar-io/Elements · GitHub, a huge amount of the geometric generation work they do is done by specifying profiles and thicknesses - columns, beams, rooms, floors, walls, etc.
My expectation would be to be able to say “create an extrusion based on this profile” in Speckle, open, say, Rhino, and have that extrusion performed on import and the outcome geometry rendered.
No expectation that this process would result in any preview data in Speckle btw, I think it’s totally fine to say “we rely on the geometry kernel of the CAD/BIM product for that”
Some of that is handled already in Speckle through the BIM types - which are set up to work perfectly already in automate. An extrusion is like a BIM type, a set of instructions for how to generate the geometry.
Our alternative otherwise is to actually have to define the output Solid which is both heavier and much harder to write.
Hopefully that makes sense