This tutorial runs you through the process of exporting your rhino geometry into ecotect and then bring the analysis data back into rhino. For this tutorial, you’ll need this following Rhinoscript.

IMPORTANT NOTE : This script only works with ordered mesh faces. See the following 3 examples and download this script to see the ordering of your mesh face.

example 1: The mesh faces are ordered here. The numbers runs sequentially from 0 to n with interuption. This is what we want in this tutorial.

example 2: This is a joined mesh. The script will not work with this type of ordering although the faces are ordered within each mesh. You’ll still get results it won’t be accurate.

example 3: This is another type of joined mesh, the face ordering are even more localized. Once again, this type of meshes will not work with this script, it’ll be for another tutorial.

1. Ok, let’s start the tutorial. Start with your nurbs surface. Once again, if it is a polysurface, make sure to explode them first.

2. Create a quad mesh with these settings. You can adjust the Min Edge Lengh and Maximum Edge Length as you see fit. Again, if you have multiple surfaces, create the mesh as seperate surfaces first, then join them as mesh. Export as .3ds.

3. Run your favorite ecotect analysis. Export the analysis data as .txt file. Import into Excel and delete the top 6 lines of headers. Read here for detailed instruction.

4. Run the script provided above. It’ll ask you for a mesh and an excel file containing the data. Once the script is finished, you can see the color of the mesh has changed. The script basically uses the mesh’s RGB value to store external data.

5. To recall those RGB values and populate them with different types of mesh componenets, please refer to the other tutorial here.

Technical Notes:Since ecotect triangulates all mesh input and doubling the number is mesh faces, this script simply skips every other number in the data file to match the quad face in rhino, therefore 50% of the data from ecotect is omitted. If a higher accuracy is required, the script can be easily modified to average out the numbers for the 2 triangulated surface for the quad. In addition, ecotect stores it’s analysis data in the mesh’s face color. But since rhinoscript does not have a MeshFaceColor function, MeshVertexColor is used instead. This is what causes the discrepency and the reason why more complex mesh objects doesn’t work with this script.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

This tutorial runs you through the process of exporting your rhino geometry into ecotect and then bring the analysis data back into rhino. For this tutorial, you’ll need this Rhinoscript, sample data, and sample geometry.

1. Start with your nurbs surface. If it is a polysurface, explode them first, meshing them as polysurface will create triangulated mesh along the seams and you want to prevent that.

2. Create a quad mesh with these settings. You can adjust the Min Edge Lengh and Maximum Edge Length as you see fit. Again, if you have multiple surfaces, create the mesh as seperate surfaces first, then join them as mesh.

3. Once again, make sure there aren’t any triangulated mesh, then save it out as .3ds

4. Import into ecotect and run your favorite analysis. One important note, if your surface is meant to be your exterior envelop, make sure the face normal is facing outward. You can check that by going to Display>Surface Normals or Ctrl+F9. In case they’re facing inward, invert them by first selecting all the faces, Modify>Reverse Normals or Ctrl-R.

5. Click on the Object Attribute Values > Properties to access the data

6. Export the data to your favorite location. Make sure you type in .txt at the end of the file name so you won’t be looking for it afterward.

7. This is what the data file looks like, and we’ll need to do a little editing.

8. Open Excel and open the data file you just saved, and import with these settings.

9. Once it’s in Excel, we’ll need to get rid of the headers.

10. Click and drag your mouse on the Row numbers on the left, right click and select Delete.

11. Your data should begin at Row 1 as shown. Save the data as .xls file.

12. Now go back to rhino, make sure your geometry is still on your screen and run the script. The script will ask for 2 things, your mesh and the location of your data. The script will place an annotation dot on each face showing the data from the ecotect analysis. Of course this is for display only, but with a little knowledge in scripting, you can use the data to drive different aspects of your geometry, possibility is endless!
Technical Notes:
Since ecotect triangulates all mesh input and doubling the number is mesh faces, this script simply skips every other number in the data file to match the quad face in rhino, therefore 50% of the data from ecotect is omitted. If a higher accuracy is required, the script can be easily modified to average out the numbers for the 2 triangulated surface for the quad.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

This tutorial runs you through the process of exporting your rhino geometry into ecotect and then bring the analysis grid data back into rhino. The method shown is a work around – numeric data is imported into rhino as a heightfield surface, then Grasshopper is used to read the height, which is then used to control the dimension of other geometries. For this tutorial, you’ll need this Rhinoscript, Grasshopper definition, and Sample Data

1. Start with your geometry. Export them into ecotect through .3ds format.

2. Run analysis with analysis grid. In this case, the analysis grid is fitted to the extent of the model with a 60×60 grid.

3. In the Analysis Grid panel, click on Grid Management to access the data export panel.

4. Export the data as .txt format.

5. The data file will have 5 lines of headers. Delete them so the data will begin at the first line.

6. The data file should look like this.

7. Run the rhinoscript to get the data into the 3D window, a “inverted” heightfield surface is created. The dimension of the surface is 10 * no. of rows by 10 * no. of columns x 50. This dimension is entirely arbitrary and can be changed via the script.

8. Create a boundary similar to the boundary of the analysis grid in ecotect.

9. Scale the surface to fit the boundary.

10. Move the surface vertically below the boundary

11. Open the Grasshopper file and assign the surface to the data surface node. Assign the number of columns and rows to U and V, these are the sampling points. these points are then projected onto a plane at z=0, and the distance between these points are measured and used to determine the radius of the circles.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License