Share a brief overview of your proposed tool or solution (1 page max) that outlines the essentials of your plan. It should include:
Intended users
Structural and architectural designers should both be able to use this tool specifically for the concept development phase of a project.
Need you’re trying to provide a solution or support for
This project will allow users to quickly and efficiently design an efficient grid shell roof structure that counteracts gravity loads by applying a kangaroo load upwards towards the roof that would be equivalent to the downward roof load.
Inputs
The main inputs will be the footprint/boundary of the roof, the density of the UV mesh (or the density of the grid shell), and the load applied to the structure.
Underlying logic of the model you’ll implement
This is subject to change, but the steps to the logic will be:
- Grasshopper takes the boundary of the roof as a user-defined closed curve in Rhino
- A surface is created from the closed curve and a UV grid is overlaid over the surface
- The UV grid is split at each intersection
- The boundary of the roof is anchored and a kangaroo load is applied upward to the UV grid
- The UV grid will then be curved and new lines will be created using the intersections of the mesh
- The new lines are then used to define the structural elements.
Outputs
The output of this project is the full grid shell resulting from the defined inputs. This geometry can then be exported from Rhino and imported into a variety of structural analysis softwares such as Etabs and SAP. Alternatively, it can also be used to define a solid along the geometry to create a physical grid shell solid geometry in Rhino.