I decided to test using a grasshopper to drive all my components in Tekla for a new project. There are a number of advantages to this. This project has precast concrete walls and a steel roof assembly. The precast walls are created using a custom component that has around 50 variables. Some walls use standard attribute files, and I have modfied the attributes in GH for others. The building is modelled in the order it will be erected so all the walls can be numbered sequentially. This means the order of custom component creation is important. When I went to re-open the model yesterday I can see Tekla had difficulty re-computing the CC’s and it took too long. I editted my GH file to disable all the CC’s and re-opened the model. This led to wonder what is the best practice when working with more complex CC’s? Is it best to disable immediately after creating or am I missing something?
Hi Brad,
Do the CCs take longer to update than inserting them for the first time? Unless it’s already enabled, there’s this option to remove the CCs while the inputs are being modified that might speed things up a bit:
With this option the CCs do get new GUIDs after each update so that’s something you don’t always want.
Otherwise heavy CCs can take some time to manipulate. It might be worth putting a Data Dam component before e.g. the attributes and/or line inputs and only trigger it when you’ve done all your changes. Metahopper also has the Group Toggle component that can enable/disable a group of components with a single click.
Cheers,
Sebastian
Below is a snip of a few of the CC’s in the model. When I opened the model with them all enabled I found that many went into a loop and did not finish calculating. When I enabled one by one they worked fine. After working on this for a few days I think keeping them disabled using a data dam will be best. The goal is GA dwgs for us, so it time it re-calculates it moves all our manual drawing mark edits.
This was a valuable exercise in the end. It took around 1.5d, but now I have fully parametric model driven by grasshopper. When the architect changes their mind I can quickly fix the model by changing a few variables. Next I need to script some of the design aspects so I do not have to manually type things in for pile depths, and beam reactions.
Hi, yeah sounds like some parallelization issue when all those components try to communicate with Tekla at the same time. Never got that fully reliable.
If you right-click the components and turn off “Run in background” they are guaranteed to run in series which probably would fix the issue - but then you need to wait for them to complete before you can change anything else in Grasshopper. So a data dam solution is probably preferable.
The outcome sounds great otherwise!