I would like to build some basic models balancing materials of different densities. Is this possible in Rhino? Is Grasshopper / Kangaroo the way to go here? Any good beginner tutorials out there?
FWIW here is an example of what I would like to simulate. This is a partially hollowed out board that is ‘unnaturally’ cantilevered out over a plexiglass cube due to its uneven weight distribution.
Hello - I think GH/Kangaroo is the way to go, yes.
-Pascal
However Kangaroo can potentially lead to lots of time wasted on trial-and-error simulations, and in your case it sounds like a simple analytic solution would suffice:
find_center_of_mass.gh (15.5 KB)
whoa, cool! I think this is actually what I was looking for… Would I be able to do this whilst accounting for the thickness of the material? I.e. could I build a more elaborate model in Rhino that represented the actual construction of the object, then run this kind (or similar) analysis in grasshopper, assigning densities to the various materials therein?
Yup, that’s the idea - As long as you have closed Breps (called polysurfaces in Rhino) or closed meshes, the Volume component should work as demonstrated above, the rest is just high-school physics 
