Searching for Rhino Structure Plug-in

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Permalink Reply by Jon Mirtschin on February 25, 2010 at 8:59pm

Hi Matthew,

To my knowledge (and I've modelled a lot of structure in and out of Rhino), I don't think there is a solver directly integrated into Rhino yet. Kangaroo is a plug-in, presently under development by Daniel Piker for conducting some forms of structural analysis. There are a lot of tensile/membrane plug-ins, but generally they export the model representation out of Rhino, or are likely not applicable.

I've done several plug-ins allowing structural model data exchange in and out of Rhino (GSA, Robot, SAP2000, Sofistik, SpaceGASS, STRAND7 and started BIM with SDNF and CIS/2). But I haven't had the time, inclination or demand to think about writing my own solver (which is reinventing the wheel, there are already enough structural analysis programs out there). There are so many dialogs and attributes for load cases etc that it would take a lot of time to do so. Instead, I've taken the approach of allowing the exchange/transfer of structural models in/out of Rhino to the approriate software, that way you can take advantage of all Rhino's powerful geometric manipulation, overlay external models for coordination etc, but still you use your preferred Analysis program. I'm intending on extending this to other programs, let me know if you have a wish for a different one. Examples of this work can be found on http://geometrygym.blogspot.com

Hope this helps,

Jon

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