Optimising Groups of Cross-Sections

Hi all,

Wonder if anyone can help out with this one:

I have a set of beams with ID 1 in my model. These can be selected from a range of RHS sections with height limited by 200mm.

I then have a set of beams with ID 2 that can be selected from all RHS members regardless of height.

In both cases I can create a crosssection list that is suitable by using the selector tools.

So - how can I optimise the cross sections correctly in my model. The "family" of sections is the same in both beam groups as they are RHS members so this confuses things I think.

Is there a way of defining a custom family for a group of selected beams? i.e. family A and family B like you would do for a section property created by yourself?

Or is the only answer to perform optimisation on set 1 and then plug the result into a second optimisation on set 2?

Any help much appreciated.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Lucas Epp on April 15, 2014 at 5:11pm

Attached is a bit of a hack - as you suggested you need to create two families with different names.

Could do this with a script component - or just modify the csv files as I've done. Then you attach the family names to the different beams and ensure you input both sets of family sections into the optimiser.

Karamba team - would be useful if the 'ReadCSTable' was able to accept data from GH (as well as a file path) to prevent having to stream the csv file of modified sections to disk.

Attachments:

Witchert.gh, 36 KB

Permalink Reply by Karamba3D on April 15, 2014 at 10:53pm

Thank's for the feature suggestion.

Permalink Reply by jjsolly on April 16, 2014 at 3:56am

Thanks Lucas that's really helpful

Would another option be to have a different new feature - a way of creating families from any and all sections? Two inputs - "sections" and "familyname"

Effectively creating design sets for the optimisation tool (which is ace btw - thanks Karamba team!)

Lucas i've taken the liberty of adding an update to the way you've done it so the export/import is automatic. See pic and component attached. I think this is what you were proposing in your scribble comment

Attachments: