Grasshopper Definition
Tool Input Interface
A Grasshopper tool that takes 2D stiffener line drawings from floor plans and generates fully parametric 3D aluminium stiffeners — producing ~3,500 components for the Metal Fabrication _ Campus project.
Metal fabrication projects require several methods of unfolding metal sheets. For the Metal Fabrication _ Campus project, tools were needed for metal sheet generation. Stiffeners are conventional subparts of metal panels — structural components that brace the panel from behind.
This tool takes 2D stiffener line drawings developed and drawn by the 2D department in all floor plans, and generates fully parametric 3D aluminium stiffeners from them. It operates as a Grasshopper script workflow — a GH Python definition that reads input geometry and numerical constraints directly from Rhino, processes each stiffener type through a parametric pipeline, and outputs fabrication-ready 3D geometry in a single run. A HumanUI interface was added to allow easy, accessible control over the tool's parameters without needing to interact with the Grasshopper canvas directly. Around 3,500 stiffeners were exported for the Metal Fabrication _ Campus project alone.
Refer to the Metal Fabrication _ Campus project page to see the stiffener output in context.
The Grasshopper definition handles two distinct stiffener types — regular edge booleans and mid-edge booleans — each requiring a different geometric operation at the panel boundaries. The definition reads the stiffener type from the input data and applies the correct boolean automatically, allowing the full ~3,500-stiffener output to be generated from a single parametric run.