Is it possible to use the existing VA profile library from GH? Say for instance I’m creating a column in GH. As part of the Options input I need a style and a profile. I’d like to use the typical UK column table which is loaded in the VA document and pick a profile. Is this possible? And what about custom profiles which also reside in the main document?
Steve Carney
Hi @steve14 you can reference a column (or a beam) style in Grasshopper, so you can obtain the list of profile sizes stored in that style. Then you can pick one of them for the new column in your Grasshopper definition:
When you work with custom profiles, those can’t have a list of sizes (each profile just stores one size). In that case, you can connect directly the “Profile” output of the Deconstruct Column Style to the Column Options and use a Deconstruct Profile if you need to do anything else with the geometry of that custom profile:
Thanks Francesc that helps.
Actually, I managed to write a grasshopper definition for a custom profile beam series that I could then process in the normal way through the VisualArq interface. It gave me a single style for the custom profile beam with the option of choosing one of 50 or so size options. It didn’t solve my initial problem but it was a nice bonus.
Hi Steve, what was your initial problem? perhaps I didn’t get it right.
I think you understood the question fine, Francesc and the answer was most helpful.
I’ve written some grasshopper code that generates a 3D portal building and analyses it in Karamba 3D. As a holiday project I thought of writing some additional code that could use VisualArq to convert the Karamba geometry into a drawn model inside GH. The difficulty is that the whole frame is made entirely from cold rolled steel sections. I’ve already got a VisualArq library of these custom profiles that inputted by hand. I can now do the drawing process directly from the Rhino interface using the VA custom profiles and my original question was about doing the drawing process from GH. And I now can, with some limitations.
Just to expand the problem a little, it is sometimes necessary to use two custom profiles back-to-back to make a compound column. The VA library I put together is only for the single versions so there is a little work to compose the compound column by hand. It’s not a big problem. I did try creating a profile of the compound and converting it to a column style and it works, even if the two elements have a gap between them, but the insertion point always defers back to the centre of the single column. By the way, it would be nice to have the insertion point on the centroid of a custom profile, it seems to be the geometric centre?
Thanks Steve, I got it.
Yes, the center alignment of a column is taken from the geometric center of the profile bounding box. We can consider calculating the centroid of the profile as another insert point.
