Thursday 31 March 2011

GH GSA Form Finding Tensegrity

A first study of tensegrity form finding using GSA, I plan to add to this post some models of some nice towers.



Here's a start to that, note I'm looking to adjust the component calculation order as the solver needs to be computed only after all other components have calculated.  If you have problems of only partial model update, try deleting and adding a new solver component (or disabling, recomputing, and enabling).

Model Files to try yourself.

Wednesday 23 March 2011

Galapagos and GSA solver

It's still early stages of testing and development of some recent work I've been doing to enable access to GSA solver directly within Grasshopper (and importantly Galapagas).



The attached example is still primitive, I'll find a moment to extend it to include a stiffness per mass objective, but it does demonstrate a few aspects of using this technique.

All feedback appreciated, including requests for more components to save manual generation of GWA attributes (which is shown for the point load generation).

Grasshopper Definitions
GSA    SAP    SpaceGASS    Egret    Robot

Monday 21 March 2011

Grasshopper-GSA Form Finding and Structural Analysis


Some really exciting new features to be activated in the next public build of the Rhino/Grasshopper plugin connecting to Oasys GSA that will allow generation of a complete Structural Analysis model within Grasshopper including loads, materials, analysis tasks and solver controls.  This will allow form finding of membrane and tensegrity structures incorporating advanced structural attributes including loads, with realistic materials.

This will not be real time "dynamic" response such as kangaroo physics plugin (which at present can not perform at real time speeds with realistic materials and stiffness).

Interrogating and utilizing analysis results will also be enabled, including more conventional models and frames.

If you have requests/suggestions for this release don't hesitate to get in touch.  Other popular solvers including SAP2000, Robot and Strand7 are expected to follow in the near future.

I'll shortly be posting more detailed instructions, but for the time being you can download the grasshopper definition from here : Grasshopper Definition  You'll need latest Plugin for GSA from http://www.geometrygym.com/downloads