Controlling GSA from a Rhino Plug-in

There's been a few requests for help with controlling Ansys from Grasshopper or Rhino on the Rhino newsgroup or Grasshopper forum lately, and in my discussions with them, it's generally been agreed that for a skeletal frame, it's likely to be easier and quicker to use a frame analysis program like GSA to do the exercise. (Possibly influenced by my limited experience with Ansys, which is an amazingly capable but complex analysis program).

GSA have a free version for any academics or students, refer http://www.oasys-software.com/information/universities/educational_licences.shtml

And to assist with getting started, I created a small Rhino Plug-in project that generates a GSA model from scratch and runs an analysis.

Download source code : rhinoControlGSA.zip

If you have GSA running, you can supervise and interact with the program after execution. If GSA is not running, it will run as a background process.

If you're looking for the GWA data on the rhino model objects created using the SSI tools, try using the command GetUserText (or the user string attributes in the Rhino SDK). I'll improve the event watcher shortly so that GWA node coordinates are updated when a node is moved.

This is just the start of interaction with Rhino, there's another level of using the Plug-in code as a library. Feel free to get in touch if you wish to learn more.