Curved surface control geometry for placing symbols

[Palle]

Hi all.

For use in a theatre set design, in which we are planning to hang a large amount of prisms on individual winches, I want to storyboard possible iterations of their heights. So I'm looking for an easy way to achieve smooth curves, and thinking there's a way to use either a NURBS surface or a subdivision object as control geometry to address a z-value to each prism. It is important that it is a surface and not a series of lines - so I only have to manipulate one object to make curves in both x and y direction. 

 

In the attached file all symbols are placed using one list of coordinates, so my thought is that there's a way to connect a control geometry and read the height at the x,y values from the lists, and adding that value back to them.

 

Does anyone know how exactly to do so, or have another idea? 

 

(My light designer is already doing this dynamically in Vision using madmapper, but I really want to do it inside Vectorworks if possible for my storyboards...)

 

Much appreciated, 

Palle

Prism generator - marionette test.vwx