Introducing 'Exoskeleton' - A wireframe thickening tool

A collaborative effort by David Stasiuk and Daniel Piker, Exoskeleton brings simple wireframe thickening to Grasshopper. You input a network of lines, and it turns them into a solid

(without the heavy calculation of a Boolean intersection of many pipes and spheres).

The input line networks can have any topology, and need not form closed polygons or volumes, so could come from algorithms such as DLA, leaf venation, or Woolly threads.

The resulting meshes are ideal for 3d printing and further processing, such as subdivision with WeaverBird and relaxation with Kangaroo.

There are settings for the thickness of the struts, node sizes, and whether to leave openings at nodes with only one connected line.

The approach we used is loosely based on the one described in the paper Solidifying Wireframes by Ergun Akleman et al.

Thanks to Giulio Piacentino for helpful discussion in the development of this idea, for WeaverBird, and the GHA wizard, to Mateusz Zwierzycki for convex-hull ideas, and Kristoffer Josefsson for helpful discussion.

Exoskeleton001.gha

(component will appear under the Mesh>Triangulation Tab)

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Comment by Christian Schmidts on December 22, 2012 at 3:45pm: amazing work guys! here is a little suggestion: wouldn' it be possible to intergrate surfaces into the exoskeleton? to combine line-like typologies with surface-like ones..

Comment by Ali Habibian on December 22, 2012 at 12:14pm: :D ?????

Comment by Navaneeth on December 22, 2012 at 11:02am: Awesome tool.Thanks!!

Comment by I_M_F [Iker Mugarra Flores] on December 22, 2012 at 7:03am: Super fantastic!!!! Faster and more flexible than T Spline Pipe!!!!.... Thank you for the tool....

GREAT WORK!

Comment by June-Hao Hou on December 21, 2012 at 8:52pm: Awesome work! Thanks for your contribution!

Comment by Arthur Mamou-Mani on December 21, 2012 at 6:49pm: You are right! It works well with Rhino 5 :) Great stuff.

Comment by Daniel Piker on December 21, 2012 at 6:47pm: Ok, just checked, and it seems there is a bug which occurs when using it in Rhino4, but not with Rhino5... we will dig into it

Comment by Daniel Piker on December 21, 2012 at 6:44pm: Thanks - its odd, but that file works fine when I open it.

I notice it is saved as a Rhino4 file - what versions of Rh/GH are you using ?