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)

Comment

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Comment by Arthur Mamou-Mani on December 21, 2012 at 5:53pm: Hi Guys,

That's very very helpful (and I like the christmassy red on the printscreens). Thanks so much for sharing your work. I just gave it a try with a basic wireframe extracted from a mesh and got the results below. What am I doing wrong?

Best wishes,

Arthur

Comment by Luis Fraguada on December 21, 2012 at 1:24pm: I swear this was awesome just prior to Rhino Crashing! Crash had nothing to do with Exoskeleton, I just had too much stuff going on on my computer.

Seriously nice contribution dudes!

Comment by Marios Tsiliakos on December 21, 2012 at 1:13pm: Thanks!! Going to test it thorougly!! M.

Comment by Rafat Ahmed on December 21, 2012 at 1:03pm: tHANKS ALOT FOR YOUR gREAT jOB

Comment by Ivan Kiryakov on December 21, 2012 at 12:51pm: THIS IS GREAT !

Comment by Arie-Willem de Jongh on December 21, 2012 at 12:48pm: Dude Daniel and others that helped, this is really cool! If I would have this plugin when I was graduating.... spend hours, actually days with a shitty isosurface external script that took hours for calculating and was really buggy in Maya. This was the final result:

http://www.suckerpunchdaily.com/2010/12/16/progression-through-unle...

Back than this was the holy grail, well i guess it still is :) Really nice! Can't wait to mess around with this!

Cheers!

Comment by RWNB on December 21, 2012 at 12:44pm: :)))

Comment by David Stasiuk on December 21, 2012 at 12:01pm: One thing to note: for some reason, vertices shared by the nodes and struts that fall in any of the world planes don't combine in the script. There are two easy solutions: 1) slightly shift your model so that its vertices don't fall in any of these planes...2) get [uto]'s meshedit tools (which you should do anyway!) and use their Mesh WeldVertices component. I have a question in to David regarding why the combineidentical vertices script seems to overlook points on the world planes, and if there comes a fix will make sure that the component gets updated appropriately!