Food4Rhino

Ankylosaurus - a heavily armored dinosaur that lived during the late Cretaceous period. With their massive club they could kill a T-Rex. The Ankylosaurus's armored skin functions like a panelized system, much like a building skin acts as protection, or armor for a building.

This plugin is a set of tools for subdividing surfaces with controlled input geometry. There are several other plugins that can do surface panelizing, but when I made Ankylosaurus, I wanted more concise tools for subdividing surfaces with basic architectural features such as grid lines and floor-plate information. I love tools like Lunchbox and Paneling Tools (and still use them myself), but I wanted to reduce some of the steps involved to subdivide a surface from specific input curves or points. I also wanted options that do not always require complex intersecting and surface splitting (which is sometimes unavoidable) when panelizing architectural geometry.

The Subdivision components that are quadrilateral (and not diamonds) output isoparametric subsurfaces of the original surface. This means that if your input surface is curved, the panels will be curved too. Native Grasshopper has the "isotrim" component, these tools do what isotrim does but with more control over the inputs. You can subdivide a surface by supplying input points for instance.

There are also some tools for unifying the U and V directions of surfaces, which may be some of the more useful components in the work that I do professionally. It saves some time from manually checking and modifying surface / brep UV directions.

And if you are panelizing trimmed surfaces, there is a component for re-trimming panels after you subdivide the surface (surface panelizing components untrim the surfaces). The trim component uses Async adapted from SpeckleSystems: Speckle Async License here (BLESS THEM).

Do some components exist in other plugins? Idk, probably... yeah, sorry. Some of these I made while learning more about the ins and outs of Rhino common. Others I may have needed a different type of input or output as well than some other useful existing components. I also started this in 2018, and 6 years later some things I made back then may have been put into the world separately. I am finally publishing this in 2024, and while the Ankylosaurus has not officially been released into the wild, it has become a part of the standard Grasshopper toolkit at every Architecture office I have worked in.

If you have problems or find bugs - feedback is welcome, bug reports will be useful. I am also open to feature requests, tho I may not be able to get to everything. I am still building this out and the first release is not every component I have developed so far - first release is the (I hope) stable ones.

Thank you for checking out my plugin! I hope you find some things useful.

-Alan