Karamba - Varying Concrete Shell Thickness

Hello all,
I’m having trouble on two fronts

  1. I’m trying to extract the utilization of a concrete dome designed using four parameters (radius, height, wall thickness at the top of the dome and wall thickness at the base - per sketch). However when I input the geometry to Karamba I doesn’t work (see image). I’ve tried converting the geometry to mesh using the Karamba and GH component, respectively, and have also tried further deconstruction of the geometry into small grids - which also didn’t work. Is it the way i’ve build the geometry or my Karamba settings ?

  2. I’m having trouble with the thickness parameters in my project - when I use the ‘shell var’ on a simple wall that has been gridded (didn’t even try on the dome because that wasn’t working) the individual mesh elements vary in thickness - not the entire wall (per image). However when I don’t grid the wall I just get error codes. Does anyone have any recommendations on how to achieve varying thickness across
    an entire wall, per my sketch ?

Thank you !
Dome sketch


Hello @Zoe_Lewis,
could you provide a GH definition where the problem occurs? Only from the images it is hard to judge what’s not working.
– Clemens

Certainly Clemens (@karamba3d)

Please see attached, and thank you for such a fast reply!

ZL_Dome Geometry.gh (848.8 KB)

Hi @Zoe_Lewis,
what version of Rhino do you use? When loading your definitions I get ‘null’ for the points which define the supports and the loads.
– Clemens

Hi @cp1
I use RH7

Hi,

The variable shell cross sections assigns a different thickness for each face of the mesh. Your original input mesh is divided into 300 parts so when you apply the variable crosssection to the Shell Element, it is applied to each Shell
ZL_Dome Geometry - mt.gh (841.4 KB)

HI @matttam
Thanks for sending this back. How can I set up the script so that the entire geometry moves from a larger shell thickness at the base to a thinner thickness at the top? Per sketch
Dome sketch

Here is one method, you just need to input a list of thicknesses for each mesh face.

ZL_Dome Geometry - mt.gh (856.7 KB)

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