Exoskeleton

Information

Exoskeleton is a free plug-in for creating meshes. It is currently comprised of two components: Exo Wireframe and Cytoskeleton.

Exo Wireframe thickens line/node into watertight meshes. It solves the nodes using a convex hull and stitches the hulls together with polygonal struts.
Cytoskeleton thickens the edge network of any existing mesh into a thickened mesh. The topology of the base mesh enables the production of a clean quad meshes whose vertices are all of even valence. Because It uses the half-edge mesh library developed by Daniel Piker and Will Pearson, it also requires the installation of the Plankton dll's and gha.

Exoskeleton remains a work in progress, and as bugs are fixed and new components and features introduced, updates will be placed here. Furthermore, Exoskeleton is an open-source library.

Download the most recent version here: Exoskeleton2_150904.zip

This has been updated to also include Plankton version 0.3.4

This library is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

(The source is available on GitHub here)

Please use this discussion forum to post questions, describe issues, and provide feedback (and examples!).

Thanks to Will Pearson, for his work on Plankton and who also has given some invaluable contributions to Exoskeleton in terms of project organisation. Thanks also to Giulio Piacentino for Weaverbird, and for general knowledge and support, and Mateusz Zwierzycki for the same, as well as for sharing his code for convex hulls, which although not used explicitly here, was very helpful in many regards for the development of Exoskeleton.

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Latest Activity: Aug 13

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Comment by David Stasiuk on August 26, 2014 at 12:49am: Hi Aidan and Ewa-

Yes...I haven't had the chance to get this working correctly, as I've had a number of other obligations. It's hard to find the time! Ewa, would it be possible for you to post the file that's giving you trouble?

thanks,

Dave

Comment by Aidan K on August 25, 2014 at 5:32pm: Hi Ewa,

I am also getting this error occasionally, in my case, the older Exoskeleton version (without variable radius) can generate the mesh correctly, is it the same for you? I believe David has isolated the problem, but hasn't had time to fix it yet.

Comment by Ewa Kus on August 24, 2014 at 1:46pm: Hi, I wonder if anyone happens to get an error '1. Solution exception:Object reference not set to an instance of an object.'?

I get it quite often and don't know what I'm doing wrong.

Thanks in advance.

Comment by David Stasiuk on June 30, 2014 at 5:09pm: Hi Brian- yes, that's right. The Plankton libraries are used for Kangaroo's Mesh Machine as well as Cytoskeleton, so it's redundant, and Turtle is its own thing.

Hi Aidan- thanks...yes I'm trying to find the time to do the supernode thing, but I am really trying to build an integrated wireframe and curve-driven exoskeleton component, which is proving tricky to do...basically, I'd like to make all of the features available in the one component if I can, so it may take a bit. Supernodes are tough, because they can cascade (one supernode can then have to engulf another strut, etc) and there's a real risk for it slowing everything down quite a bit, so I'm trying to develop a strategy to limit that.

Comment by Brian Ringley on June 30, 2014 at 3:47pm

Could someone please confirm:

Plankton and Cytoskeleton are now packaged with Exoskeleton.
The same plankton.dll and planktonGh.dll are used by Kangaroo.
Turtle is still a separate download.

Thanks!

Comment by Aidan K on June 26, 2014 at 5:57pm: Hi David,

I'd be really interested in trying a version which implements the 'super nodes' you've been talking about. How close are you to a release? Is there a branch of the repository that includes it?

Thanks, great work!

Comment by martyn hogg on June 23, 2014 at 3:46am: Yes that's exactly what I mean!
Probably easier to create a mesh with or without struts, but also useful to be able to have zero length struts only where the nodes are too close together.
I will follow your advice for visual basic and github and see how I get on!

Comment by David Stasiuk on June 21, 2014 at 1:55pm: Hi Martyn...so you mean just have adjacent nodes attach to each other directly? This should be possible to do. I guess I'd approach it by making an override when the Distance parameter was set to zero. I don't think it would be too tricky to implement, but I don't know when I'll have the time to do it...

I use Microsoft Visual Studio Express (here it's with C#)...it's probably easiest to also install github, and then to clone the repository on your machine. Both are free!

Comment by martyn hogg on June 21, 2014 at 10:18am: David, would it be a difficult mod to make exoskeleton work without the struts? i.e. all nodes join to each other instead of having a strut between them? I'm looking to be able to add holes through a solid structure, if this makes sense. This would be great for making structures where you want fat nodes that often cause the lines to become engulfed.

I'd like to look at the code, but I'm a complete beginner... after getting the files off github, what do I do to actually look at the code? :)