Grasshopper plugin
	for NextFEM Designer & Server

Our brand-new Grasshopper plugin allows to exchange data with NextFEM Designer or NextFEM Server through NextFEM API.

It is available on Rhino PackageManager or in Food4Rhino. Continue reading for manual installation.

Installation

The NextFEM plugin for Grasshopper requires NextFEM Designer installed on the system, and was specifically designed for Rhino 8.

The .gha file can be placed alternatively:

– in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Grasshopper\Libraries for local user installation
or
– C:\Program Files\Rhino 8\Plug-ins\Grasshopper\Components for make it avaialble for all users (discouraged). Administrator privileges are required.

Then, start Rhino and Grasshopper. You should see a new ribbon bar named “NextFEM”.

Usage

Prerequisite

If you’re going to use the Grasshopper plugin with our current installation of NextFEM Designer, REST API server must be active.

Before to start, open NextFEM Designer, select the Plugins ribbon bar and click on REST API server. When the small server window is displayed, you can safely close it.

Base COMPONENTS

One of the base components is required to use any other component from other groups (e.g. Ops).

NextFEM export allows to export the current Rhino model to Designer or towards a Server, or even to a .NXF file. This command converts Curves in beam elements and Meshes (no BRep) in shell elements, finally merging overlapped nodes.

Input paramers:

– (optional) Filename: string specifying the path for saving the .NXF model

– (optional) Server: string containing the NextFEM API server address. Default is http://localhost:5151

Output parameters:

– Nodes: list of exported nodes ID

– Elements: list of exported elements ID

NextFEM Live model permits to exchange data with the model opened in NextFEM Designer.

Input paramers:

– (optional) Server: string containing the NextFEM API server address. Default is http://localhost:5151

Output parameters:

– Nodes: list of nodes ID

– Elements: list of elements ID

– Sections: list of sections ID

– Materials: list of materials ID

– SelNodes: list of currently selected nodes in NextFEM Designer viewport

– SelElems: list of currently selected elements in NextFEM Designer viewport

OPS COMPONENTS

This group contains all the possible operations with the model data. Typically, such components requires as input the parameters supplied by the a Base component.

• Element data: takes as input element IDs and returns various information about the elements
  
• Node: takes as input a list of node IDs and returns a vector with the coordinates of each node.