Mesh relaxation in Kangaroo2

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Permalink Reply by Lincoln Frost on June 15, 2016 at 10:27pm

Ah, found some useful functions in Weaverbird, much better now ... still wondering if the solver can transform the original mesh geometry or if the new mesh has to be constructed from transformed edges as below

Permalink Reply by Anders Holden Deleuran on June 16, 2016 at 3:00am

Hi Lincoln, I would recommend going through the examples that ship with Kangaroo2. They're really useful for quickly getting up to speed with the new workflows and goals (as opposed to forces in Kangaroo1), also go through the pdf documentation. Anywho, a few answers:

"clumsy way to select naked edge vertices":  Standard Grasshopper has a component ("Mesh Edges") which returns mesh edges based on their valence (valence 1 would be the naked edges)

"not sure how to re-constitute a new mesh": Use the "Show" goal, which enables you to pass along any discrete geometry (points, lines, polylines, meshes) through the solver. A good approach in general is to organize your goals in a data tree (use "Entwine") on the solver input side and then unflatten the solver output on the other side (use "Unflatten Tree").

Hope that helps :)

Permalink Reply by Lincoln Frost on June 16, 2016 at 3:39pm

Hi Anders, thanks for those hints, I'll try them.  I have looked for material to help get up to speed, but my Kangaroo download included only a very minimal pdf.  Where can I find the examples & documentation you mention?

Permalink Reply by Anders Holden Deleuran on June 17, 2016 at 1:45am

Ah yes, it looks like Daniel didn't include the examples folder in version 2.1.2 and 2.1.4. if you download 2.02 they're still in there. Additionally check out this thread and make sure to search the forum (and the Kangaroo sub-forum). There's a lot of golden nuggets, but they are indeed a bit all over the place.

Permalink Reply by Lincoln Frost on June 17, 2016 at 3:45am

Got it ... however many of the examples do not run for me - for instance because of this:

I can't figure out where to get this Kangaroo components thing from.  there seem to be quite a few barriers to getting going for the newbie

Permalink Reply by Lincoln Frost on June 17, 2016 at 4:30am

In fact, I guess I'm whingeing, but 90% of the Kangaroo examples from ver 2.02 install package do not run with a new installation of Rhino 5 + Grasshopper latest + Kangaroo latest.  Nothing with the Grab function works, and many other files give missing component messages similar to the above.  I'm guessing that checking of files must have been done on machines with older installations & components still present.  Maybe I have to also install some earlier version of Kangaroo?  Which one I wonder?

Permalink Reply by Anders Holden Deleuran on June 17, 2016 at 6:13am

Could be a version issue, I'm running:

Rhino Version 5 SR13 64-bit
Grasshopper 0.9.0076

With these .NET frameworks:

On this system:

There are a few threads with similar install issues on the board (especially related to the Grab component). Maybe do a bit of searching, Daniel has outlined how to resolve these issues as far as I recall.

Permalink Reply by Lincoln Frost on June 18, 2016 at 10:45pm

Thanks Anders ... I have similar OS and versions except for .NET which is 4.6.1 (no previous versions listed in control panel Programs & Features)

It looks from the forum posts as though that is a problem, Grab won't work after about 4.5.1

Reluctant to downgrade .NET at this stage

Permalink Reply by Anders Holden Deleuran on June 17, 2016 at 4:31am

Those are part of the mesh utilities from Kangaroo1 (that haven't yet been moved over to K2). So just download and install Kangaroo Physics 0.099 and you should be good to go.