Configurations in Grasshopper?

Hello,

anyone knows if there is a plug-in for Grasshopper to add similar functionalities like the Design Options in Revit or Scene States in 3ds Max? (even if the latter is just for rendering options).

Or I ask for suggestions on how to create configurations in Grasshopper, if it possible in some ways.

I have to make daylighting analysis of a building and test tens of combinations of different elements characteristics.

To make it simple, let's say I have a small building with windows on one facade and I have to test configurations with one, two or three windows, each windows of a number of different sizes and carrying a number of different sizes shading devices.

So the main issues are:

1 - build a system by components that allows me to Enable and Disable geometries. When I have to select the facade wall with one, two or three windows holes I need to switch between three different wall geometries and relative windows + shadings.

2 - Have the possibility to get the output of the configuration only when the new combination is totally ready. I say this because if the new configuration has two or more elements' characterics changed, the daylighting external engines will start a new calculation when just one of the characteristics is changed. In this case what would be needed is to temporary lock the solver and unlock it when all the changes are done. Lock and unlock the solver should be done automatically for each configuration.

The Data Dam component maybe can be used for this but not sure yet.

Thank you!!

Francesco

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Andrew Heumann on March 10, 2015 at 2:41pm

As long as the total space of variation of the model can be controlled via sliders + boolean toggles (and a few other standard UI components) you can utilize "Saved States," under the solution menu - these let you restore the settings of those UI components based on a saved state.

Permalink Reply by Francesco De Luca on March 11, 2015 at 2:16am

It's a good hint Andrew thank you. Saved States is what I mentioned as examples (Design Options in Revit and Scene States in 3ds Max) but for the scope I would need to select the different states from within the project definition using a slider that is possible to animate in order to automate the process. Actually I partially solved the problem with a Stream Filter component (I attach a definition of a much simpler example comparing what I described in the post and a screenshot). But this is a half solution because in this way all the geometries should be Internalized or coming from Rhino and all the associated parameters should be written down singolarly. What I think would be interesting to have is a system that given a series of inputs (geometries and parameters) create all the possible combinations between them where each combination is a configuration, and then every configuration can be selected with a slider like in the definition I attached here.

Attachments:

configuration-selector.gh, 284 KB

Permalink Reply by Miguel Villegas on July 9, 2016 at 1:21pm

This is very interesting as a designer-client interface helper (aspect a lot of us are willing to enhance, and Andrew himself with Human might be the strongest worker).
The problem, I guess, is how to handle the millions of configurations a bunch of simple sliders could give...
I want to try some software whose name I don't want to remember regarding their concept of "robust rules". It is supposed to be developed for engineering, but I think this concept can be wonderful for architecture.

RSS