COMPAS Timber Documentation
COMPAS TIMBER is an open-source package for modeling, designing and fabricating timber frame structures.
COMPAS TIMBER is written in Python and and is a part of the COMPAS ecosystem. It also features an implementation for Rhinoceros 3D as a Grasshopper plug-in.
COMPAS TIMBER is an active research project and is being continuously developed at Gramazio Kohler Research at ETH Zurich. At the current stage, the library encompasses tools for fast and intuitive design of frame structures with simple joints using custom object classes for beam, joints and assembly entities to maintain parametric and semantic information about the structure. In the future, it will be expanded to entail interfaces to structural analysis software and specialist timber construction software, assembly sequencing methods, fabricability checking tools and more.
Dependencies
COMPAS TIMBER builts upon the COMPAS framework.
It inherits many basic geometry classes like Point, Line, Vector etc. from COMPAS.
For more complex types of geometric objects like Brep, it resolves to environment-specific backends. For example, if the code is run in Rhinoceros 3D, it uses RhinoCommon SDK to handle Brep geometry, and if the code is run in a python process, it will default to OpenCascade via COMPAS OCC.