Analyse any truss construction design within seconds

Custom truss constructions

The truss constructions at large music stages become bigger and more complex. Festivals want to have their own unique stage, with a custom truss construction. These constructions are very expensive if they have to be custom made, or you have to deal with a limited set of standard shapes with existing products.

Software and building blocks

FrameFlux is offering an affordable option for creating your custom construction. Yufe Wong, cofounder of Frameflux: “We invented an adjustable, reusable building block, with which you can create any shape structure you want, with the same level of form-freedom as a snake!” Besides the physical product they also developed in-house parametric design and analysis software tools to rapidly design these custom shapes and analyse them. “You can perform a structural feasibility check in seconds on an unlimited set of forms, including the conventional shapes.” This removes a barrier to the use of the truss, since it would be difficult to engineer and design some of the complex structural shapes that become feasible.

Hitting the market

After demonstrating the software tools to customers and receiving a lot of enthusiasm, FrameFlux wanted to take the next step. After an elaborate vendor selection, FrameFlux partnered with VIKTOR for their experience and integration with Grasshopper and Python, along with a user-friendly interface to suit the needs. Since March 2020, the two companies have been collaborating to deliver this software product, named Antalyze One. This application allows integration with SCAD Re-Event, a popular 3D CAD program for the Dutch event industry. Now a super-fast workflow for design of standard truss beams is realized: users can create a design in SCAD Re-Event, export the data to the web-based VIKTOR platform, and then instantly run a Grasshopper-powered structural feasibility check. It is also possible to make changes in VIKTOR and re-import these back into SCAD Re-Event. VIKTOR’s fine grain data management systems, for user information and technical data, allow for such automation when coupled with Grasshopper. In future, integrations with other CAD programs will be possible.

A user-friendly interface

“With VIKTOR we’ve got a friendly user interface and a good integration with our existing Grasshopper model, instead of starting over again.” In the web-application an event designer can also upload their design and other relevant inputs whenever and wherever they want. As before, this information is sent to the Grasshopper model in which the analysis is done. The results of this analyses are sent back to the web-application and visualized for the event designer.

The 'Antalyze Two'?

The decision to automate this process is an easy one according to Yufe “A designer can now create, develop and get a structural feasibility check on their preliminary designs of loaded straight beams without hours of spreadsheet work or consultation.” There are already plans for a potential ‘Antalyze Two’, which will be able to process a much greater variety of structural shapes. “Especially for custom-made constructions it could take weeks before a design was analysed by a consultant. With our software and the web-application made on the VIKTOR platform, a check could be run on squares, circles and snake-like structures… in only a matter of seconds!”

Interested in developing web-applications as well? Check out our parametric design solutions!