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.

Members: 403
Latest Activity: Jan 6

Discussion Forum

Exoskeleton meshes not joining??

Hi,I have just started using Grasshopper for university so please excuse my ignorance.I am trying to use Exoskeleton to thicken lines to use in an architectural rendering. My first few attempts did…Continue

Started by Deanne Neilson Sep 10, 2018.

Can't get Cytoskeleton to load.

Rhino 6.I have Plankton v0.4.2 from https://github.com/meshmash/Plankton/releases (I also tried Plankton v0.3.0). Using…Continue

Started by Mike May 15, 2018.

Problem Using ExoW

Hey Guys,I am having a problem when joining two wireframes into one Exoskeleton Mesh. As you can see in the Pic#1 I was able to thicken the wireframe while having a problem after mirroring the…Continue

Started by Xiaojiao Xu Apr 16, 2018.

exo producing open mesh 2 Replies

Hey guys,I'm trying to create a mesh for 3d printing, but my exoskeleton/cytoskeleton and plankton components are producing this open mesh instead of the air tight closed mesh. As you can see from…Continue

Started by Clayton Nickum. Last reply by Clayton Nickum Feb 5, 2018.

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Comment by David Stasiuk on May 13, 2014 at 2:17pm: Hi Harrison-

Yes it does...you can find a more detailed explanation of the features here: http://www.grasshopper3d.com/profiles/blogs/exoskeleton-cytoskeleto...

One other issue that has come to my attention is if two struts are at too close an angle to each other, the component may return an "object reference not set to an instance of an object" error. I will try to include a test for this in an upcoming release.

Tudor-

I'm not sure if I know what you mean exactly, but I am open to treating engulfed struts differently. One approach I had thought of would be to simply extract offending struts from the solution and give the component a warning message that would show the indices of the failing elements. Another, more complex approach, would be to collapse the ends of offending struts into a "super node"...but this would make the component run quite a bit heavier, particularly if there were several failures in a try, and one fix could cause another failure, etc.

Comment by h on May 13, 2014 at 11:30am: Does this new version fix the bug which results in (seemingly) random mesh vertices to be placed at the origin (i.e., [0,0,0])?

Comment by Tudor Cosmatu on May 13, 2014 at 5:52am: Just thinking out loud here,

could it for example treat an engulfed line as if it would be an endpoint, so for example take its midpoint instead of the line? Not quie sure if it makes sense. Other then that seems to work just fine!

Thanks again!