Working with Third Party Plugins

Created by Mohamed Khaled Ashmawy, Modified on Thu, 12 Jan 2023 at 03:45 PM by Mohamed Khaled Ashmawy

Adaptive Parts Environment (APE) supports Third Party Plugins to help users design their own process on Grasshopper. In this article, we will go through this feature and how to use it.


Synchronous Plugins


Adaptive Parts Environment (APE) supports most of the synchronous Grasshopper plugins available, these plugins make static changes to the geometry and can be easily implemented. In this example, we tried to use two of the most used plugins -Weaverbird and Lunchbox- in a hybrid workflow to create extruded smoothed diamond panels.

Generally, we will create the diamond panels from Lunchbox and by turning them into a mesh, we will smoothen and extrude them by using Weaverbird.


NOTE: Check below for the example files.


Kangaroo


Kangaroo is one of the most popular plugins for Grasshopper which provides a lot of possibilities for users, the plugin is supported in Adaptive Parts Environment (APE) to empower users to design and implement complicated scripts.

In this basic example, we will implement Kangaroo in our workflow to design and simulate a shell pavilion, the main idea is to set up your parameters as Ape Inputs and define the final kangaroo mesh as Ape Object. Please note that if you used the default BouncySolver from Kangaroo you'll get a warning message and your geometry won't bake.



To avoid this you need to use the ZombieSolver.


NOTE: Check below for the example files.








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