I’ve been experimenting with converting 3-dimensional surfaces into chainmail style models using Grasshopper. By creating a model that adapts to any 4-sided polyline, and applying that model to each face of a 3-dimensional quad mesh, a repeating, parametric pattern can be generated. If that model had “links” that lined up between cells (meshes), then a chainmail model would result.

One thing I sometimes find myself doing when working with data lists in Grasshopper is splitting a list so that each nth element is in a different list. For instance, say I have a spiral of points, with the points being equally-spaced on a series of angles (eg. 60º, 120º, 180º, etc). The points have been created by feeding a Point Polar with a range of angles and a range of distances. The result is that the points describe the spiral in one long list with no knowledge of the fact that…