Help Making a Furniture Builder

My apologies I am a complete Grasshopper noob, (but a long time Rhino fan). I keep avoiding Grasshopper since I find it very intimidating even though I think it could solve a lot of needs. Here's my most pressing one:

I design kits for DIYers to build their own tables, bars and desks out of iron pipe. The designs fall into 3 or 4 consistent arrangements of fittings and pipe, all that changes is the dimensions of the pipe to suit the customers length, width and height requirements.

Currently I put all the pre-built fittings into a drawing and then shuffle everything around and scale pipes to fit. Easy but still time-consuming. I've seen some Grasshopper demos that suggest I could build a script that takes a finished drawing but then allows the height, depth and width to be varied just by pulling on the top and sides. The pipe would scale but the fittings and top would not. Then I could just pull the parts list with the pipe dimensions into a CSV to have the custom cut/parts list.

Any ideas, help getting started or links to anything similar would be much appreciated.

Attachments:

Tasha Table.jpg, 123 KB

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Joseph Oster on November 16, 2017 at 1:55pm

Not difficult. Not sure I want to do it (for free) though. You might take a look at this:

TubeTable_2015Oct22a.gh

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/forum/topics/the-case-of-the-missing-t...

Permalink Reply by Joseph Oster on November 16, 2017 at 4:46pm

Here's something more specific to your image - the easy part. These 'Pipes' are useless for your purposes but the center lines for them are a valid basis for your T-fittings, end caps and pipe segments. I won't do any more on this, I promise. Sliders are in inches.

Attachments:

table_2017Nov16a.gh, 34 KB

Permalink Reply by Jethro Null on November 16, 2017 at 4:56pm

Wow, Joseph, thank you! I'll give it a shot right away:)

Permalink Reply by Joseph Oster on November 16, 2017 at 5:37pm

Here are the "derived dimensions" (yellow group) - the rest are all slider inputs. These don't include the couplings, of course. Subtract those fixed dimensions from these to get your real pipe segment lengths. Not so intimidating, eh? Cheers.

Attachments:

table_2017Nov16b.gh, 24 KB

Permalink Reply by Jethro Null on November 16, 2017 at 5:46pm

Christmas came early! What can I say Joseph? You are too kind. I have it up and running and can probably do any tweaks necessary from here on (and I can certainly learn a lot!).

One question. Is it possible to add blocks (say of pipe fittings) and have them just follow one of the moving points? Or control the position of that block in parallel to the GH generated components? I just dropped a Tee fitting into the drawing and lined it up but I don't know how to link it. Also, it hides the preview of everything below it (in the y plane).

Permalink Reply by Joseph Oster on November 16, 2017 at 6:04pm

Is it possible to add blocks (say of pipe fittings) and have them just follow one of the moving points? Or control the position of that block in parallel to the GH generated components?

Short answer: yes. Longer answer: if you know how... Not trying to be coy, I just want to avoid hand-holding, so to speak. There are different ways of doing almost anything, depending on your experience and skill level. At the very least, I don't think it's difficult at all to achieve this objective:

all that changes is the dimensions of the pipe to suit the customers length, width and height requirements

You can compute those values easily from this model. Showing the fittings in their appropriate locations and orientations might be beyond your skill level at this point.

Permalink Reply by Jethro Null on November 16, 2017 at 6:13pm

Yes, I think you might be right. Well you opened my eyes. Thank you for that. The code you gave me does all the basics I need. I will now keep exploring.

Permalink Reply by Joseph Oster on November 16, 2017 at 7:18pm

The designs fall into 3 or 4 consistent arrangements of fittings and pipe

This is a slippery slope for me, because it's fun... This version demonstrates a couple of ways to handle standard options. It tends to look a little messy but it's really simple, using 'Steam Filter' and 'Value List' to choose different inputs.

The first one, 'Table Size' in the gray group, offers a choice between "Custom" ('length' and 'width' sliders as before) and "Standard", which gets length and width from the list of "Standard Table Sizes", where the 'table' slider lets you choose one of the standards from the list.

The list of standard tables could include other parameters beyond length and width.

The second value list/filter, near the bottom of the GH canvas, is called 'cross stretcher'; it offers a choice between "One", "Two" or "Three" cross members connecting the table legs:

The possibilities are endless. Have fun.

Attachments:

table_2017Nov16c.gh, 32 KB

Permalink Reply by Jethro Null on November 16, 2017 at 7:38pm

Jeez man, you are addicted! I am blown away. In one evening you've solved months of frustration. Thank you so much.

I should tell you to stop but... if you REALLY want to keep going, give me some clues or hackable examples of how to add those fittings and render it like it was a normal drawing.

Permalink Reply by Joseph Oster on November 16, 2017 at 8:02pm

It's a can of worms, my friend, too specialized to be of general interest. My advice would be to start with the simplest parts, the fittings at the top and bottom of the legs. Then move on to the T fittings on the middle "cross stretcher". It's a small step from there to T fittings on the legs, unless the option for two or three cross stretchers is chosen, in which case those leg T fittings get replaced by... parts that are impossible to find? Wasn't easy to find this:

Permalink Reply by Jethro Null on November 16, 2017 at 9:29pm

Its called a side outlet tee, although confusingly, some call it a side outlet cross! I buy iron ones (and all the other iron pipe parts) by the ton from China where they call them Mi Side tees (don't know why). There's my 2 cents in return for your buck fifty!

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