<< After years of growing presence in the product design, furniture and jewellery industries, supporting Karamba3D is a major step we are taking towards new tools and new workflows for parametric engineering in the AEC industry. If you’re interested in learning more about this, keep reading along. >>

Tools For AEC

Karamba3D is a well known tool within the structural engineering community. It brings accurate and straightforward analysis of frames, spatial trusses and shells to Grasshopper. Needless to say, support for Karamba3D on ShapeDiver has been long anticipated by plenty of ShapeDiver users...

As of today, we’re happy to announce that Karamba3D joins the ever growing list of supported third-party plugins on ShapeDiver. You can now use the popular plugin on our platform to run cloud calculations and visualize deformations using our online viewer.

Karamba3D In The Cloud?

Among other useful features, the Karamba3D integration lets you run finite element calculations in the cloud and then visualise color-coded results directly in the ShapeDiver viewer. Once the model is online, it becomes easy for your clients or project partners to access your algorithms, iterate through different options and visualize the consequences in real-time, directly in a web browser!

Create a Free ShapeDiver account today and start testing this plugin!

Furthermore, section sizes can be downloaded from the parametric model in TXT or CSV formats, center lines in DXF or DWG and final deformed mesh as 3DM or OBJ. With this new tool, ShapeDiver aims to encourage fruitful teamwork across disciplines and we believe that Karamba3D in the cloud opens a range of possibilities for creative collaboration between architects and engineers.

Below is an example of applications for structural analysis made by our friends at RhinoForYou. This I-beam dimensioning tool calculates and outputs final cross section based linear loading. The beam geometry is coloured by stress levels and the numerical values are displayed in the chart.

This example above has been provided by RhinoForYou, experts on structural calculations, software development and anything parametric. Get in contact with them if you want to know more about their services.

Where To Start?

At the moment, we have deployed the Karamba3D Pro Trial version of this plugin in our main servers, so any Free or PRO user can already test its functionality. This means that if you have an account with us, you can already upload models that include this specific version of the Karamba3D’s plugin.

It is important to remember that this specific version is limited to 20 beams and 50 shells. Also keep in mind that not all Karamba3D features are supported yet. In particular:

• Karamba3D tags and symbols are not displayed in the online viewer. However, in most cases they are easy to recreate with native Grasshopper components if needed. 

• Uploading loads is not yet possible, since it requires some changes to the ShapeDiver import components.

Conclusions

We are excited to keep working on this integration and our goal is to support all Karamba3D features and even offer dedicated 8-core server systems to take advantage of the plugins multi-threaded capabilities very soon. Both ShapeDiver and Karamba3D development teams are committed to working together on bringing you the full power of Karamba3D to the cloud!

Are you or your team interested in testing the full version of Karamba3D PRO without any limitations? Contact us for more information!

<< Let us know what you think and post any requests on ShapeDiver Forum. We are happy to learn about your own use cases and how we can make this new feature as helpful as possible. >>