r3nder / forte

Designing generative structures by interactive sketching

Forté: User-Driven Generative Design

An interactive sketch-based tool that lets you create organic structures such as this robot's new leg.

Caveat

The current version is limited to a few platforms. Let me know if you'd like to run Forté on something different.

• The MATLAB setup is specific for Mac OS.
• The client-server communication currently is set up for Google Chrome only.

Prerequisites Installation

• Install the R2016b(9.1) MATLAB runtime to run compiled MATLAB application for topology optimization.
• Install Python if you haven't.

Running Forté

1. Open Terminal, navigate to Forté's directory.

cd forte-master

2. Start Forté backend.

./run_forte.sh

3. Open another Terminal window or tab, navigate to Forté's directory, and start a local server for Forté front end.

./serverup.py 8888

4. Start Chrome with flags to enable client-server communication.

./chrome.py

5. In Chrome, navigate to http://127.0.0.1:8888/. Voilà!

Hello World

Let's get you started with Forté by redesigning this leg for a quadruped robot.

Forté's tool bar, just for future reference.

Step 1: You start by drawing this curve, which represents how you want the new robot leg to look like.

Step 2: You then draw the load (the weight of the robot's body) in red arrow, and the boundary condition (the ground where the leg stands) in blue.

Step 3: Then hit the ▶ button to play with different techniques you can select from the dropdown list.

Step 4+: Your turn! Play with the tool.

Resources

To learn more about Project Forté, please visit the project page, or read the Medium post.