It’s an interesting challenge. I tried something similar a while ago using Octopus Loop (I did the deformation bit using Kangaroo, but I think the same general approach should work with Karamba).
Presumably what really matters is that the final loaded structure deforms to your target shape. If you find this, then you can remove members in the reverse order of construction and analyse to get the intermediate shapes. This way you don’t need to be changing the number of parameters during the optimisation.
The loop I used was:
- start with unloaded structure in target shape
- apply loads
- get vectors between each point of the deformed shape and the target shape
- move the points back by (1+a) times this vector and use this as the new unloaded shape.
- return to step 2
For reasonable sized deformations this seems to converge pretty quickly to a shape which when loaded deforms to exactly the the target shape. Just using a=1 seems to work well.
target_deform.gh (26.3 KB)
After just 5 iterations it gets to the green shape, which when loaded deforms to the red shape
