When you work with Kangaroo for Grasshopper and start tweaking goal “Strength” parameter you find some strange values like 10,000 for Anchor (points), 10 for Length(Line) (springs), etc.
Those values are set to keep a general balance between forces but they are useless in a complex simulation or in case you want to simulate some real-life scenario with real materials.
In that case you must go back to Hooke’s Law and especially to the E parameter (elastic modulus).
From Wikipedia:
An elastic modulus (also known as modulus of elasticity) is a quantity that measures an object or substance’s resistance to being deformed elastically (i.e., non-permanently) when a stress is applied to it.
Kangaroo spings Strength parameter depends on this elastic modulus.
You can find the elastic modulus for any material online but here’s a few hints for having a proper setup of your Rhino+Grasshopper model:
- Use meters as modeling unit.
- E must be in GPa.
- Work with scalar strengths (Kangaroo default strengths) initially and switch to real-life strengths only for final simulation: using real-life strengths makes simulation extremely slow.
You might be interested in these video courses.
Click on the following image to download the script and start using real materials strength in your simulations.
