Metamorphic has developed a new Grasshopper plugin to integrate implicit modelling, voxel processing, and vector-field capability within Rhino 3D’s parametric modelling tool.
The design and engineering consultancy company believes its Morphé plug-in will help to address the fractious nature of computational design. It has grown from Metamorphic’s experiences in quantum technologies, bioprocessing, and optomechanical systems, with the company motivated to reduce the need to ‘step backwards through the workflow’ when a significant design change is required.
Rather than users having to go back a number of steps to regenerate a model, export again, and repeat downstream processing, Metamorphic has sought to engineer a plug-in that brings implicit modelling, voxel processing, and vector-field capability to the place where computational geometry is being generated.
Per the company, by working inside Grasshopper, advanced geometry can remain ‘connected to the rules, parameters, optimisation processes, simulation data, and engineering intent that created it.’ A designer can generate a complex manifold parametrically, smooth selected regions using voxel methods, allow simulation data to influence its form, and continue developing the geometry without turning the process into a ‘disconnected sequence of software hand-offs.’
Morphé allows structures to be generated from curves, surfaces, or mathematical definitions, varied spatially and connected to the wider Grasshopper definition.
“Not every useful engineering form begins with a clean mathematical description either,” say Metamorphic AM co-founders Laurence Coles and Manolis Papastavrou. “Scan data, meshes, and experimentally derived geometry also need to participate in advanced design workflows. Voxel methods create another route for manipulating these inputs without forcing them into an inappropriate modelling paradigm. The opportunity is therefore not implicit versus voxel modelling; it’s allowing different representations to do what they do best without each transition becoming a dead end.”
Metamorphic suggests that the Morphé plug-in will allow designers to explore more alternatives before resources are committed to manufacture, while increasing the probability that the geometry selected is the right one in the first place. The company also says it has engineered the plug-in to bring more advanced solid-modelling capability into an ‘environment that many computational designers already understand.’
While Metamorphic believes that traditional CAD will remain indispensable for assemblies, interfaces, engineering drawings, dimensioning, and huge amounts of everyday mechanical design, it suggests the future of design for additive manufacturing (DfAM) is likely to involve ‘increasingly connected toolchains in which conventional CAD, computational design, simulation, optimisation, implicit modelling, and manufacturing software each perform the tasks they are best suited to.’
The company is expected to share more information on Morphé in due course.
