Rhinoceros » Plugin

V-Ray 1.5 for Rhino Beta Now Available

nnnaaarrr — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:14:36 +0000

The V-Ray 1.5 for Rhino Beta is now available! Now users can enjoy features such as V-Ray RT, Dome Light, Proxy and many more. Sign up now to evaluate the new features and enhancements included in the latest release.

Please, note that upon release the new version of V-Ray for Rhino will be running with a Hardware Key (licensing dongle) installation only.

…

New Features

V-RayRT
Dome Light
V-Ray Proxy
Lens Effects (Glare / Bloom )
Dispersion
Retrace Threshold
Ambient Occlusion
VRayDirt
Interpolation (Reflections and Refractions)
IES Light
Sphere Light
Additional Parameters
Improved Rhino Integration
V-Ray 1.5 for Rhino supports the RDK Sun
V-Ray 1.5 for Rhino supports the 32 and 64 bit versions of Rhino 5.0. as well as the 32 bit version of Rhino 4.0

more…

T-Splines 2011 Design Contest

nnnaaarrr — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 15:43:12 +0000

Contest Details

The T-Splines 2011 design contest, “Make the world a better place” is now launched! Register now to compete for over 100 prizes, including CAD software, iPads, and 3D prints.

Special free trial software bundles are available for your use during the contest when you register.

There are five categories: architecture, transit, jewelry, consumer products, and miscelleneous.

The architecture category comes with a special offer: Z Corp will ship 3D prints of your model to you during the contest so you can see your design evolve in real life!

Details.

Hoopsnake:

nnnaaarrr — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 14:50:40 +0000

Hoopsnake is a component that allows feedback loops within Grasshopper.

Description:

HoopSnake, apart from a legendary creature, is simple component for Grasshopper. What it does in principle is to create a copy of the data it receives at it’s input upon user request and store it locally. This duplicate is made available through a standard Grasshopper parameter output.

What turns this operation from mundane to actually promising is the fact that the input of the component includes some custom programming to escape Grasshopper’s recursive loop avoidance check.

What this means in practice is that it is possible through the use of HoopSnake to send the output of a set of components back to it’s input in a looping fashion. With the help of a little bit of Data Tree / Data List manipulation, this should open up some new possibilities for iterative process modeling.

more and download…

[VIA: Hoopsnake Group | Rhino3d Blog]

An Introduction to Grasshopper for Rhino

nnnaaarrr — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 10:33:50 +0000

Live! Wednesday, April 27, 2011 — 11:00am PDT

Grasshopper is a visual programming platform that offers the possibility to explore parametric and associative designs with unprecedented fluidity. In this introductory webinar, Grasshopper guru Andy Payne will take a look at the Grasshopper interface and walk through a series of examples that take advantage of various generative and associative modeling techniques.

Andy Payne is a licensed architect and founder of LIFT architects who is currently pursuing his doctoral degree at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Andrew’s work explores embedded computation and parametric design and is a co-author (with Rajaa Issa) of The Grasshopper Primer which provides an in depth look at the Grasshopper plug-in for Rhino.

Registrate Now

[VIA: Novedge Webinar Series]

TsElements for SolidWorks

nnnaaarrr — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 12:08:21 +0000

[VIA] Rhino News

Mark Biasotti has recently published two free video tutorials that provide the usage and implementation of TsElements for SolidWorks.

Download…

How to model a faucet…

How to model a joystick…

SectionTools Plugin for rhinoceros

nnnaaarrr — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 14:19:45 +0000

[via: rhino newsletter]

The latest version of Sectiontools Plugin for Rhino 5.o wip is realeased with some improvements.

What’s new:

Added new command “stEditSections” to edit sectioning options such as solid mode, direction and attributes. stEditSectionHatch and stSectionDir are now part of the new command.

Combined “stView”, “stSetCPlaneToSection” and “stSetViewToSection” into one new command “stViewSections”. You can now “Clip”, “SetView” and “SetCPlane” all in one step.

Added support for persistent options to stCreate, stCreateArray and stViewSections commands.

Fixed a bug when flipping section direction.

2D Layout now outputs curves, solids and hatched to 3 different sub-layers. This will help assign different layer attributes to each one.

Made it more reliable to view section curves, surfaces and hatches.

Fixed CPlane alignment bug.

Added a new item to “SolidMode” option in stCreate and stCreateArray commands. It allows adding both hatches and surfaces at the same time.

Added enhancements to stMoveSections command. Dragging sections’ now gives real-time feedback of intersections and section clipping plane location.

When creating sections, selecting objects is now a separate step from options. This way it will be possible to preselect objects and change options.

Fixed duplicate polycurves in 2D layouts bug.

Enhanced reporting output

Fixed a crash bug when saving as V4 then open in V5.

Many other minor bug fixes.

Added nine new short clips and updated toolbars and help manual.

Downloading and Installing

Scan-and-Solve for Rhino

nnnaaarrr — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 02:05:29 +0000

This video demonstrates stress and deformation analysis by Scan&Solve of a free-form sculpture represented in Rhino by a polygonal mesh of its boundary that is imported from a stereo-lithography (STL) file format.

About Scan&Solve

This plugin for rhino performs stress analysis on solid models (through seamless integration within rhinoceros).

More…

Download Scan&Solve for Rhinoceros

Grasshopper 0.80001 available

nnnaaarrr — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 13:42:34 +0000

[Via: Rhino Newsletter]

The first version of the Grasshopper 0.8 series is available for download. The reason we rolled the minor version number is because clusters are available again.

There are many other enhancements.

Details…

Also, check out the growing list of Grasshopper plugs-ins. Here are a few examples:

Firefly – bridges Grasshopper, the Arduino micro-controller, the internet and beyond, allows near real-time data flow between the digital and physical worlds, and reads/writes data to/from internet feeds, remote sensors and more.
Kangaroo – Live physics
Geco – Link to Ecotect
WeaverBird – Catmull-Clark smoothing, Loop smoothing, Sierpinski Triangles, Sierpinski carpet, Mesh Primitives, and Loop subdivisions
Rabbit – L-Systems and Cellular Automata
Galapagos – Evolutionary Solver (included with Grasshopper 0.8)
SSI – Data exchange with IFC, GSA, Robot, SAP2000, Sofistik, Strand7, SpaceGass, SDNF, CIS/2, Digital Project, REVIT, Bentley and Tekla
DIVA – sustainable design with Radiance, Daysim, and Evalglare
GHowl – connect Grasshopper with Excel files, iPads, iPods, iPhones, Processing, Pachube, etc.

More…

LEDAS Releases LGS 3D v4

nnnaaarrr — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 13:35:01 +0000

Novosibirsk, Russia: October 25, 2010

LEDAS Ltd today announced the release of version 4.0 of LGS 3D, its powerful geometric constraint solver. This is the core technology for parametric design software, allowing users to express their design intent in 3D parts and assemblies through geometric and dimensional constraints.

Version 4.0 introduces important new functions that customers will find useful for assembly design and direct modeling. It also significantly improves reliability and performance.

New Features in LGS 3D 4.0

LGS 3D v4 introduces (infinite) cone and torus objects. They can be fixed, or be linked with other objects with different constraints: coincidence, tangency, parallelism, perpendicularity, and angular dimensions. In the context of assembly designs, cone and torus objects are used to model spatial and kinematic relationships in mechanisms, such as bearings and variators. In direct modeling applications, they can represent fillets and chamfers, and they adjust their form to satisfy constraints. For example, cones can change their angles and tori change any of their radii. In addition to non-rigid cylindrical and spherical surfaces introduced in previous versions of LGS 3D, cone and tori now allow users to models many kinds of parametrized mechanical parts, such as brackets, bearings, and hinges.

An important function introduced with LGS 3D v4 computes the degrees of freedom (DOF) of parts in mechanisms. Any rigid set in LGS 3D can have up to three translational and three rotational DOFs. When rigid sets are linked by constraints to other fixed objects, the appropriate DOFs are eliminated automatically. A new function returns the number of remaining DOFs for a particular rigid set. Also returned is geometric information, such as directions and axes. LGS-based applications can now represent this data to the end user, a feature that has been highly requested for kinematic analysis.

LGS 3D v4 supports tangency constraints with parametric curves and surfaces that represent non-canonic objects. These features are used to express complex kinematic relations in advanced mechanisms.

Also new in LGS 3D is its ability to deform canonic curves and surfaces when they are moved under constraints. This applies specifically to circles, cylinders, spheres, cones and tori. (In previous versions, the deformation was limited to static constraint solving.) Version 4 also generates the correct diagnostics for models with these non-rigid objects.

A new LGS 3D function returns information about loops in over-defined constraints. (In previous versions, users were only alerted to the condition and were provided no additional information.) Version 4 now allows constraint relaxation to be applied independently of each over-defined loop. This means that it is now faster for users to make their models consistent.

Reliability and Performance

Version 4.0 of LGS 3D contains significant advances in reliability and performance. A new analysis on inconsistent models improves performance three-fold. The technical and algorithmic optimization on large models with thousands constraints increases the performance of LGS 3D by 10-25%.

LGS 3D v4 also contains enhancements to its API that provide better context management and more detailed journaling.

“Version 4.0 really is a ‘major’ release,” explained Alexey Ershov, Director of Research and Development at LEDAS. “We are not only introducing important extensions, but for the first time are providing full solutions to both assembly and part modeling.”

About LGS Software

Since the first commercial release in 2004, LGS 2D and 3D software components have been licensed by a dozen CAD/CAM/CAE vendors, who have embedded the components into their applications successfully.

The 2D and 3D geometric constraint solvers are used as parametric engines for 2D sketching and drawing, 3D direct modeling, assembly design, motion analysis, and other applications. LGS 2D and 3D are cross-platform software packages running on 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, *BSD, AIX, HP-UX, and other operating systems. Both solvers have a C-style API for easy integration into a broad range of software applications using a variety of wrappers, such as .NET, Java, and C++.

LGS 2D/3D supports the creation and modification of geometric models through explicit and implicit constraints. Geometric objects that can be constrained include points, lines, circles, ellipses, planes, cylinders, spheres, cones, tori, NURBS, application-defined parametric curves, and surfaces. Objects can be fixed in the absolute coordinate system or relative to each other. Supported constraints include geometric relations between objects (coincidence, parallelism, tangency, and so on) and dimensions that specify the required values for distances, angles, and radii. LGS 2D/3D moves and rotates objects to positions that satisfy all constraints, yet minimizes transformations from initial configurations.

Other LGS functions implement advanced features of CAD/CAM/CAE systems, such as diagnostics of over- and under-defined parts of models, engineering variables and equations, help points, and tolerance management.

Available as free downloads from the LEDAS web site are “Lege’n’d 2D/3D” example applications. These consist of sample models representing different kinds of 2D sketches and 3D assemblies. The applications can be used to test the functionality, robustness, and performance of LGS 2D/3D. They were created with the Open CASCADE open-source application framework; the source code is available to all licensees.

To learn more about LGS 2D/3D, visit the LEDAS Web site at www.ledas.com/products/lgs3d.

About LEDAS

LEDAS Ltd. is an independent software development company founded in 1999. It is based in Novosibirsk Scientific Centre in Akademgorodok, the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Science. A leader in constraint-based technologies, LEDAS is a well-known provider of computational software components for PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) solutions: geometric constraint solvers for CAD/CAM/CAE, optimization engines for project management, work scheduling and meeting planning as well as interval technologies for knowledge-based engineering and collaborative design. The company also provides services for PLM markets: software development, consulting, reselling as well as education and training.

More information about LEDAS is available at www.ledas.com.

VSR Shape Analysis 1.0

nnnaaarrr — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 22:33:24 +0000

This plug-In based on Rhinoceros 3D contains functionality to analyse Curves and Surfaces following several criteria.

Features:

Dynamic Section (with optional Curvature Plot)
Curve and Surface Matching Analysis (checks for Position, Tangent and Curvature continuity)
Light Lines (Simulation of Isophotes)
Deviation (between Curves, Surfaces and Meshes)
Curvature (on top of Curves and Surfaces)

VSR Shape Analysis 1.0 is the fully embedded shape analysis solution for Rhinoceros^_®. It analyses Curves, Surfaces and Meshes for several criteria.

It can be used associatively during modeling to control the quality of created and modified geometry at any time ensuring the highest possible quality level.

Analyses can be saved in the Rhino 3DM file across sessions.

Download

Homepage: virtualshape.com