Plankton

Information

Plankton is a free and open library implementing the half-edge data structure for polygon meshes.

This way of storing the mesh connectivity information allows easier adjacency queries and supports mesh faces with any number of sides (Ngons), not just quads and triangles.

The plankton library is intended primarily to be referenced and used from scripts, but basic GH components for conversion and topology extraction are provided, and more may be added at a future date.

Plankton is still very much a work in progress. This is a first release, and methods/features will change in future versions.

Currently most of the methods relate to extracting topology information from existing meshes, and converting between Rhino meshes and Plankton meshes, but the intent is to over time add more ways of actually modifying and building meshes.

Please share your thoughts and ideas in the forum...

download the latest release here:

https://github.com/meshmash/Plankton/releases/latest

This library is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

(The source is available on GitHub here)

For more on half-edges, see:

http://www.flipcode.com/archives/The_Half-Edge_Data_Structure.shtml

http://openmesh.org/Documentation/OpenMesh-2.0-Documentation/mesh_hds.html

http://www.graphics.rwth-aachen.de/media/papers/directed.pdf

Thanks to the people I have had many conversations about meshes with over the last few years that have really helped inspire and inform this work: including: Daniel Hambleton, John Harding, Kristoffer Josefsson, Harri Lewis, Giulio Piacentino, and especially Dave Stasiuk, who also shared code that helped get this working.

Website: https://github.com/meshmash/Plankton
Members: 381
Latest Activity: Jan 30

Discussion Forum

Cytoskeleton 27 Replies

Following on from the images I posted recently (here),I am now making available the source script for Cytoskeleton.First,…Continue

Tags: mesh, Plankton, Weaverbird

Started by Daniel Piker. Last reply by Serge Jul 31, 2020.

Target valency remeshing

Hi,I’m using mesh machine to have a good triangulation of my mesh but I was wondering if I can set target valency for my edges in order to control triangulation. I want to have a triangulation where…Continue

Started by Contestables Jan 21, 2020.

Dynamic remeshing script with Plankton and Kangaroo 90 Replies

Here are some demo's of remeshing with Plankton combined with some relaxation functions from Kangaroo.(Similar to what I described here: …Continue

Tags: remeshing, mesh, Kangaroo, Plankton

Started by Daniel Piker. Last reply by Contestables Jan 20, 2020.

Internal data structure 5 Replies

Plankton 0.4.2. If I take any simple mesh object generated in grasshopper and convert it with the PMesh module, then try running the following python code, I get:for v in…Continue

Started by Cory. Last reply by Will Pearson Nov 27, 2018.

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Comment Wall

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Comment by thomas_do on May 8, 2018 at 7:55am: Hi again, one thing to add:

I have problems installing weaverbird due to a missing admin licence.

Could that be the reason that meshmachine does not work?

Comment by thomas_do on May 8, 2018 at 7:22am: Hi,

I have finally managed to load Meshmachine within Kangaroo0099 following the tip in this forum:

https://discourse.mcneel.com/t/meshmachine-plankton-related-questio...

Am I right that it is not possible to run meshmachine within Kangaroo2?

Now my problem is similar to Farah's. In Grasshopper, the component does not work. The error message says:

1. Solution exception:Could not load file or assembly 'PlanktonGh, Version=0.3.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

So unlike Farah's error message it's looking for PlanktonGh and version 0.3.0.0

Trying this on a university PC

Cheers

Thomas

Comment by Will Pearson on February 27, 2017 at 3:33am: Farah – When/where are you seeing this error? Have you unblocked all the .dll/.gha files? (right-click, properties, unblock)

Jay – Plankton doesn't have very many components as it's mostly used for scripting. I wonder if this is why it seems not to be loading... There are a few components which can be found in the "Mesh" tab, under "Triangulation". Are these present?

Gene – Thanks for sharing! I'm really glad that you've been able to build something so cool on top of Plankton! I'll keep an eye on the Leopard forum/github in case there are any cross-over support topics that I can help with :)

Comment by Farah on February 26, 2017 at 9:01am: 1. Solution exception:Could not load file or assembly 'Plankton, Version=0.3.4.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

why does this happen? I have it download in pluggin folder, all 3 parts :(

Comment by Jay on February 10, 2017 at 5:39pm: This may be a really dumb question but how do I install the plankton 0.4.0 gha file. I've used grasshopper for a couple years now and normally just drag and drop. I have tried that, restarting grasshopper, restarting my computer and it never seems to load...??

Comment by Gene Kao on January 30, 2017 at 7:51am: Hi all,

We created an open source plugin "Leopard" using Plankton for internal mesh processing. We hope that this can be a good example to demonstrate the advantage using Plankton and help improve it.

More feedback and insights are welcome to discuss in Leopard forum.

Source code can be downloaded on GitHub.

Cheers,

Gene

Comment by johnnyUtah05 on August 27, 2016 at 8:18pm: Hi,

I am wondering how to draw hexagons/circles around clothed vertices by using their neighboring vertices distances. I have some confusion... Can this be achieved with 'Deconstruct Plankton'? (I assume yes, by getting the proper half edges).

Also, I have looked inside the 'Tangent Circle' component and see that it only measures the distance from two neighboring vertices. I believe this is why my result is imperfect. See below.

How can I tweak the tangentCircles component to achieve a more accurate result, or how can I use 'deconstructPlankton' to achieve this?

Thank you in advance. EriktangentCirclePLANKTON.gh

Comment by Will Pearson on April 13, 2016 at 4:14pm: Josh, please let us know how you get on! I've used Plankton on the Mac via compiled Grasshopper components (MeshMachine, for example) but not yet via scripting as that's only available for Rhino right now, not Grasshopper. Please shout if we can help along the way :)

Comment by josh lopez-binder on April 13, 2016 at 3:46pm: Hi all, Is anyone is using plankton for scripting on mac?

more specifically, for rhino python scripting?

I am considering trying it out, and curious if there are any tips/tricks known already.