TopOpt-DMS2019 is a topology optimization plug-in for Rhinoceros Grasshopper. This plug-in was used in the 'Robotic Wood Printing' workshop at the Design Modeling Symposium in Berlin. The plug-in is made open source with as purpose that the results that are published in the related conference paper can be reproduced. The data and log files of the results as presented in this paper can be found in the folder with example files. The conference paper can be found here.
TopOpt2019-DMS is software as it is. I do not garuantee that the software will be maintained and bugs will be fixed. The plug-in can be used, however, calling an external python program outside Grasshopper makes it less easy to install and use by unexperienced Grasshopper users. It was not the purpose to make an easy to use plugin, I only made it available to make it easier for other people to reproduce my work.
To make the plugin easy to use for other people it should completely be written in C#. Currently I am not working on this, but if you are interested in developing this further I am happy to support you. If that is the case, please contact me.
- Download the latest release file from the release page.
- Unzip the release file.
- Place the folder "DMS2019" in the Grasshopper Libraries folder (File -> Special Folder -> Components)
- Keep the folder structure intact in order that the following paths, folders and files exists
/Grasshopper/Libraries/DMS2019/DEN /Grasshopper/Libraries/DMS2019/INPUT /Grasshopper/Libraries/DMS2019/LOG /Grasshopper/Libraries/DMS2019/MAIN.py /Grasshopper/Libraries/DMS2019/TOPOPT.py /Grasshopper/Libraries/DMS2019/TopOptDMS2019.gha - Unblock the files: right-click on the file and select properties from the menu. Click unblock on the general tab.
- Restart Rhino
Inside Grasshopper an external python program is launched. Python 3.x needs to be installed. Make sure python is installed and can be launched from the windows command line. Make sure that the libraries numpy and scipy are installed. After you installed python, you can install numpy and scipy from the command line with the following commands:
pip install numpy
pip install scipy
By default the Grasshopper component runs the topology optimization program with the command python from the windows command line. If you launch your python installation with a different command, e.g. python36, you can change this by setting python36 as last input for the component that runs the topolgy optimization program. An example is shown in the figure below.
For visualization of the results the plug-in Human can be helpful. This plug-in can be downloaded from food4rhino: https://www.food4rhino.com/app/human. Components of this plug-in are used in the example files.
TopOpt-DMS2019
Copyright (c) 2019-2020 Arjen Deetman
TopOpt-DMS2019 is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3.0 as published by the Free Software Foundation.
TopOpt-DMS2019 is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with TopOpt-DMS2019; If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
@license GPL-3.0 https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
Significant parts of TopOpt-DMS2019 have been developed by Arjen Deetman as part of a research project on continuous timber fibre placement at EDEK Uni Kassel.
The python code of TopOpt-DMS2019 is partly based on the python code of Aage and Johansen.
Aage, N., Johansen, V.E. (2013). A 165 LINE TOPOLOGY OPTIMIZATION CODE. Retrieved November 2, 2019 from http://www.topopt.mek.dtu.dk/Apps-and-software/Topology-optimization-codes-written-in-Python
