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 Bradley Bowers on January 26, 2015 at 11:23am: Aidan,

When I Flatten the lines going into Exoskeleton, it returns an error of "Index was outside the bounds of the array" . . . The odd part is the preview for the mesh is all unified, grouping seems to occur when I bake it . . . Any insights as to what I am overlooking??

Comment by Aidan K on January 26, 2015 at 9:37am: Hi Bradley,

Try flattening the input line network (right-click, 'Flatten'). That should fix it.

Comment by Bradley Bowers on January 26, 2015 at 9:20am: David,

THANK YOU for that insight . . . but like all things one step forward is new territory. So! Now that I have it sorted and the lines are "webbing" nicely, my mesh output is creating individual "mesh-modules" when I bake the final mesh output. I attempted to run a MeshUnion, and then attempted to run Cytoskeleton's thicken (bad idea).

I also baked the final meshes and attempted a MeshBoolean within Rhino . . . that operation failed. Is there a reason that these mesh aren't uniting? They all share the same origin lines . . . is this confusing or is it just me?

vasi.gh

Cheers,

Comment by David Stasiuk on January 26, 2015 at 2:49am: Hi Bradley-

I think the main problem you're having with your def (the one you've attached) is that you some combination of several very small lines and very tight angles. That's why you're getting the error "1. One or more struts is engulfed by its nodes". What's happening is the convex hull being solved on either side of your curves is bigger than the curve itself, so the mesh breaks. Probably the fastest way of working through this is to use Daniel Pikers "Topologizer" (http://www.grasshopper3d.com/profiles/blogs/topologizer-network-cle...) which allows for you to combine and clean line networks according to a preset tolerance. A lot of these conditions are resulting from the voronoi solution you're using, which can make for very small intersection faces between cells.

Comment by Bradley Bowers on January 25, 2015 at 11:08pm: David,

I recently started tinkering with Exoskeleton, and it works . . . somewhat. I am getting what seems to be a selective cooperation from it. I have attached the file to this message . . . I even cited some of your "code" from your complex example and I get nada . . . do you know what the issue might be as to why I am getting only some cooperation from Exoskeleton??

vasi.gh

P.S.
I have Weaverbird and Kangaroo

Comment by David Stasiuk on November 24, 2014 at 12:47pm: Hi Simone...Exoskeleton uses a list of lines as input, and it works better with a flat list rather than data structure. So you should explode your curves and use a flattened list of lines. However, it also looks like your polylines don't intersect at start and end points...exoskeleton at this time relies on a network of lines where the start and end points match up.

Comment by Simone Cimino on November 24, 2014 at 8:46am: Hi all,

I tried this plugin giving simple inputs but it seems it doesn't work.. What do I have to do?

Thank you

Comment by Jason Wheeler on September 6, 2014 at 2:14pm: Hi all, I downloaded the plugin the other day and am having fun with it!! Great job!! .... I was wondering if someone could explain why I am getting a certain "kink" in this simple file. The opposing corners don't seem to be getting them.Exoskeleton%20Practice.gh

Comment by Ewa Kus on August 27, 2014 at 1:22am: Hi Dave, thank you very much for your interest. Ironically, I somehow cannot encourage him to crash right this way right now :) But as soon as I do, I will be grateful for your help.

Thanks,

Ewa

Comment by David Stasiuk on August 26, 2014 at 12:49am: Hi Aidan and Ewa-

Yes...I haven't had the chance to get this working correctly, as I've had a number of other obligations. It's hard to find the time! Ewa, would it be possible for you to post the file that's giving you trouble?

thanks,

Dave