Food4Rhino

Variable Offset

A lightweight Grasshopper plugin for generating variable offsets from polylines, designed specifically for urban-scale setback analysis and planning regulation studies. The tool takes a polyline input and a corresponding list of offset distances to generate offset geometry with different distances for each segment.

Key Features

• Fast processing (~0.02ms per polygon) optimized for urban-scale analysis
• Simple interface: input polyline/polygon and list of offset distances
• Handles both inward and outward offsets
• Basic cleanup of self-intersections (this is not perfect and will improve over time)
• Suitable for batch processing large datasets

Common Applications

• Urban setback analysis
• Planning regulation compliance checks
• Parcel development envelope studies
• Building footprint generation

Limitations

• Self-intersections may occur with complex variable offset configurations
• Basic intersection cleanup may not handle all edge cases perfectly

Requirements

• Rhinoceros 8 or later
• Grasshopper

Getting Started

• Component can be found under Crv>Util
• Input your boundary polyline
• Provide a list of offset distances corresponding to each segment
• Connect to the component to generate the variable offset result

Source Code

Available on GitHub: LINK