PAYETTE is happy to announce the first official release of the SkinDesinger plugin for Grasshopper!
This release is the culmination of over a year and a half of development on the part of our own Santiago Garay. Visit SkinDesigner’s food4Rhino page to download and test it out yourself.
SkinDesigner is a Grasshopper plugin that enables the rapid generation of facade geometries from building massing surfaces and repeating, user-defined panels. It has the geometric freedom to create virtually any facade geometry that is composed of similar repeating elements. However, unlike traditional Grasshopper workflows for generating such facades, SkinDesigner makes use of the following:
BLOCKS – Full façade systems are built with blocks for each repeating panel type. The use of blocks keeps the file size down and enables the “scaling up” of local façade concepts to large buildings.
DETAIL CONTROL – Flexibility to generate either fully-detailed facades (with solid geometric elements, mullions, etc.) or to generate simplified surface geometry (more appropriate for environmental studies, calculating metrics like glazing ratio, etc.)
CUSTOMIZATION CONTROL – The ability to specify the number of unique panel types that are generated from a continuous numerical data set. This enables the creation of data-driven facades that maintain control over their degree of customization.
PANEL INVENTORY VISUALS – Visualizations of the number of panels of each type in a given façade.
INFILLING – Automatic infilling “leftover” surface regions with custom panels when the dimensions of massing surfaces are not evenly divisible by the panel dimensions.
SUBDIVISION OF CURVED SURFACES – Automatically subdividing single-curvature surfaces into panels of a consistent dimension.
In the coming weeks, we will be rolling out a number of resources to help get you up to speed with all of the capabilities of SkinDesigner, including tutorial videos that will be posted to PAYETTE’s Vimeo site.
For now, you should check out our example files to get yourself familiar with typical SkinDesigner workflows. You should also feel free to post any questions, feature requests, or bug reports to the SkinDesigner Grasshopper Group as discussions. Finally, SkinDesigner is an open source project and all of the project’s source code is visible on PAYETTE’s Github site as well as within the Grasshopper components (by double-clicking on them).
Related:
The Evolution of PAYETTE’s Parametric Façade Tools
The Next Thing in Parametric Design
The 2025 OpenLAB Boston studio work will be exhibited at Virginia Tech Monday, March 2nd through Wednesday, March 4th.
Please join us for the following events on Monday, March 2nd:
11:00am - Lecture with Parke MacDowell
1:00pm Lobby talk with Kevin Sullivan
This year’s studio identifies seven sites along the frayed edges of Boston’s Greenway. The Greenway is a one-mile-long linear park running through the heart of the city, reconnecting downtown Boston with its waterfront. Many of the parcels along its edges remain undeveloped and present mute, blank facades to the public realm. Addressing and repairing these edges through acts of infilling, layering, grafting, framing, and placemaking is the core focus of the studio—SUTURE.