SkinDesigner

91 members

Description

SkinDesigner is a Grasshopper plugin that enables the rapid generation of facade geometries from building massing surfaces and repeating, user-defined panels. 

To install:

1-Make sure you have Rhino 5 and Grasshopper installed, or Rhino 6.
2-Install GHPython from here (Rhino 5 only).
3-Select and drag all the userObjects (downloaded here) onto your Grasshopper canvas.
4-Restart Rhino Grasshopper.

Check out our example files  to get yourself familiar with typical SkinDesigner workflows. Also SkinDesigner Tutorials will be posted in this YouTube playlist as they become available. 

You should also feel free to post any questions, feature requests, or bug reports to the SkinDesigner Grasshopper Group  as discussions. Finally, SkinDesigner is an open source project and all of the project’s source code is visible on SkinDesigner’s Github site as well as within the Grasshopper components (by double-clicking on them). 

Discussions Members

SURFACE-PANEL Mode Panel max Width-Height dimensions

by Santiago Garay

Apr 26, 2022

Hi Usmi,

For some reason I can't reply to your posts in the previous thread. But since the questions have evolved anyways to some other areas of the tool I thought won't hurt to create a new post and repost your questions. See my answers below:

Hi Santiago,

I have watched your tutorial and this surface panel option has grown the power of Skindesigner by manifolds. Albeit that, there are two aspects on which I'd ask for your input:

1. The panel adopts the shape of the host surface but is there any way to restrict the panel dimensions (W*H) to a specific maximum number?

2. I see that now parameters (minimum panel height and width) do not work. And only the Minimum area can control the panels. Is there any way that I can control the panels by their minimum height and width?

I actually want to cover the maximum surface with the panels within certain dimensions of the panels.

Is that possible through Surface Panel Mode?


Thanks a lot!

That is not possible in SkinDesinger in Surface Panel Mode, just because this would require to cover a lot of use cases (ex. you need to handle width-height based on any given plane). The approach here is to leave all that to be handled before using SkinDesinger through other tools that can already handle that effectively.

For your case, you basically subdivide the surfaces using grasshopper components to meet those requirements and then send them to SkinDesinger. I did a quick search and I found this link for instance:

https://www.grasshopper3d.com/forum/topics/divide-a-surface-by-a-sp...

Once you have the resulting surfaces you can send them to SkinDeisgner. Hope that makes sense.

  • up

    Santiago Garay

    Actually now that you mentioned the Ladybug workflow, there is also another way I used there to get those surfaces using SkinDesinger. If you look at the gh file from Hydra you will find this solution around the mid/bottom of the script(see crop below).

    This basically is doing what you are after, notice the panelGeo output in the last component, those resulting surfaces have the dimensions of the PBase panel created. These can now be plugged in into a new SkinDesigner component with SURFACE_PANEL MODE turned on. Check it out and let me know if you have any questions.  

    3

    Apr 26, 2022