🟪 Paving Kit FAQ’s

🚧 Under Construction…


CAMPUS > Paving Kit > Paving Kit FAQ’s

Installation 


Q: What are all the plug-ins that need to be installed for Paving Kit to run properly? 
A: Paving Kit examples sometimes use the Elefront and Human plugins, open-source downloads, which are included in your Paving Kit installation files.

Q: How do I get a workflow started with Paving Kit? 
A: To get a basic workflow started all you need is a surface, which is your paving area, and a point of beginning (POB), which indicates the starting point of the pattern. The surface is your paving area, which can be piped into the Create Areas Paving component. Once you have an Area Instance (A) created from your surface, you can pipe that into the Add Pattern to Area component. This component is where you determine your pattern style, paver dimensions, seam dimensions and rotation. Your Area Instance (A) output contains all of this information and is ready to be trimmed using the Trim Pavers to Area component after which you can see your results using the Draw Area Pattern component. This component brings in your Area Instance (A), color choices, a value indicating a paver type, and the thickness of your pavers. The outputs to these will display your paving design.

Q: What are color rules? 
A: Color rules are a way for Paving Kit to guide the color gradients of your pavers.  There are several tools you can use to control or modify your color rules and gradients. The simplest method is using a color mix which you can create with a simple percentage control over two colors or a multi-mix which allows you to input a sort of recipe for the inputs colors. Attractor curves and points can also be used to guide the color gradient as well as an image, such as a JPEG, which maps the color inputs to the image colors to visualize the image in paving form. 

Q: What types of outputs are there for the pavers? 
A: While they vary in the processing power needed to produce, the different types of paver outputs are curve, surface and extruded. If your output is extruded pavers then a thickness must be given to them. It should be noted that extruded pavers should be saved for smaller sites as they require the greatest processing power and large sites could crash Grasshopper and Rhino.

Q: Can I project my pavers to a 3D surface or mesh? 
A: Yes you can project to a mesh, but not to a surface. The Project Paver Meshes component is built to do this task for you. While the output of the Draw Area Pattern component is only curves, surfaces or closed BREP (extruded type), grasshopper can easily convert surfaces and BREPs into meshes. After doing so you can input you newly meshed pavers into the Project Paver Meshes component alongside your 3D topo mesh and your output will be your pavers projected to your topo mesh.
If you need to project to a surface then you can convert your surface to a mesh first.  

Q: How do I create my own custom pavers? 
A: Paving Kit offers two main ways to create your own custom pavers. The first is with the Add Custom Pattern component. This reads the pattern of closed curves you have drawn over your paving area and turns them into pavers. The second is using the Add Tessellation Pattern component. This component is unique in that it reads your custom drawn paver using curves and then asks for points for reference in order to guide the way the pattern tessellates.  

Q: What are array modules? 
A: Array modules are a surface/BREP with closed curves overlaid on the surface to indicate how the surface will be broken up. The surface/BREP is arrayed across the paving area with the pieces of it broken up according to the closed curved providing a custom pattern which is nested within a regular one.
Land Kit - copyright 2020Â