Weekly Workflow: Quick, Dynamic Building Massing with LunchBox for Grasshopper

Posted on by Nicole Mater
LunchBox for Grasshopper interface showing building mass utilities, including options for 'Area Constrained', 'Boundary and Area', 'Boundary and Floors', and 'Floor Count'.

Our founder, Nathan Miller, developed LunchBox for Grasshopper as a toolkit with a variety of helpful utilities for designing in Rhino. This free ‘grab-bag’ of geometry tools became popular for its paneling utilities, and it continues to be one of our most popular downloads. The latest release of the plugin expands on its features to include building massing utilities. These tools can help you quickly create massing schemes that fit specific boundaries, areas, and number of floors based on your project’s unique goals.

Prerequisites

Building Mass (Area Constrained)

Grasshopper screenshot showing the LunchBox 'Building Mass (Area Constrained)' component in Grasshopper, detailing inputs for total area, footprint dimensions, and floor-to-floor heights.

This component uses a target area, width, length, and a list of floor to floor heights to draw a mass. It returns a list of floors as planes and a mass boundary.

Building Mass (Boundary and Area)

Screenshot illustrating Rhino and Grasshopper workflow using LunchBox's 'Building Mass (Boundary and Area)' component, showing inputs for boundary, target area, and floor heights.

This component uses a boundary curve, target area, and list of floor to floor heights to draw a mass. Similar to the previous component, it returns a list of floors as planes and a mass boundary.

Building Mass (Boundary and Floors)

Grasshoppper screenshot of the LunchBox 'Building Mass (Boundary and Floors)' component showing inputs for floor boundary, number of floors, and floor-to-floor heights, with output surfaces.

This component uses a boundary curve, number of floors, and list of floor to floor heights to draw a mass. It returns a list of floors as planes and a mass boundary.

Building Mass (Floor Count)

Grasshopper screenshot of LunchBox's 'Building Mass (Floor Count)' component in Grasshopper, showing inputs for number of floors, footprint width, footprint length, and a list for floor-to-floor heights.

This component uses a plane, number of floors, a given width and length, and list of floor to floor heights to generate a building mass. It also returns a list of floors as planes and a mass boundary.


Send Geometry to Revit

These tools can be used with interoperability tools like Rhino.Inside or Conveyor to send your massing geometry directly to Revit. The video below shows an example that uses LunchBox in Grasshopper and Rhino.Inside to draw and dynamically update floor plates in Revit.

Thanks for following along. Have questions? Reach out to our team at apps@provingground.io.