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: Oct 18, 2023

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Comment by Aidan K on May 16, 2014 at 5:54pm: I have a line network that Exoskeleton001.gh can generate succesfully, however the new version returns the following error, what might be the problem? Thanks.

Comment by David Stasiuk on May 16, 2014 at 12:06pm: It needs clean meshes to run...so if you join multiple meshes, you have to make sure that you weld all of the vertices together. Weaverbirds "join and weld" component does a good job with this, although sometimes it has a hard time welding everything that should be. [UTO]'s MeshEdit tools have an amazing weld vertices component that runs super fast and clean. I'd recommend that you join and weld your meshes, and then split disjoint meshes after (so this way, if you have discrete geometries, then they will be captured as multiple elements). If you do this, then when you feed them into cytoskeleton they should run well.

Comment by MARIO VERGARA on May 16, 2014 at 11:01am: By the way

why ca´t you join meshes before using Cyto component???

Comment by MARIO VERGARA on May 16, 2014 at 10:54am: Hi David:

Great now it´s working

Comment by David Stasiuk on May 16, 2014 at 10:49am: Hi Mario-you should be able to get around this by just running your Rhino meshes directly into cytoskeleton rather than passing them through the PlanktonMesh parameter component first. This error has to do with some issues related to the fact that the Plankton.gha and PlanktonGH.dll are both producing the same object type, but somehow they don't work correctly with each other. Daniel knows more about it than I do...but like I said, so long as you feed cytoskeleton a regular mesh, it will convert it to a PlanktonMesh internally, no problem.

Comment by MARIO VERGARA on May 16, 2014 at 9:05am: hi guys

i´m getting this error

any ideas?

Comment by Aidan K on May 14, 2014 at 11:26am: Indeed, I hadn't installed the newest gha, you've solved the problem! In the example, the scale of the geometry is on the limit of "manufacturability", so in that sense, a tolerance input shouldn't be necessary. Thanks for the fix!

Comment by David Stasiuk on May 14, 2014 at 10:06am: First of all...wow, super cool! Second of all, my guess is that if you're working with really small geometries at 1:1, the tolerances still aren't low enough for the hull to Solve properly. Quick question: have you installed the gha from the link in this group? The first gha I put out there had much too high tolerances. However, if it's still breaking with the new gha, could you do me a favor and try scaling up your geometry considerably? I am thinking more and more that I should add a tolerance input...

Comment by Aidan K on May 14, 2014 at 9:38am: I'm having a recurring problem of missing nodes when dealing with small, complex geometries. In one application, we generate internal lattice structures within a bone implant, and the resulting mesh has broken nodes at seemingly random locations, with no error reported. I've used Exoskeleton quite a bit, and this only seems to happen in this particular case. The line network is generated by creating point grids on the mesh and populating the region between them with PanelingTools. As I increase the resolution of the point grid, the structure gets more concentrated, and these broken nodes start to appear. I've played with the number of sides, radius and node depth quite a bit, and although it does improve in some configurations, the naked edge problem is never entirely gone at higher pt grid resolutions. What might be the issue here?