AEC / Examples
The clearest way to understand what ShapeDiver does for an engineering team is to see what other teams have built with it. These are real apps from engineering firms, a BIM software vendor, and a precast manufacturer (from AI-assisted structural design to precast design-to-fabrication), each one a Grasshopper definition running in the cloud, usable in a browser.
Structural engineering
An engineering firm headquartered in New York, with more than 2,000 people in over 40 offices, working across structural, façade, forensic, and construction engineering. Its R&D group, CORE studio, set up in 2011, builds software, computational models, and AI tools for the rest of the firm.
New York, USA
CORE studio runs more than 30 ShapeDiver apps across the firm - taking structural tools that once lived in a specialist’s Grasshopper file and putting them in front of every engineer, in a browser. A few of them:
Structural design & optimization
Asterisk is CORE studio’s second-generation structural design platform. It uses custom machine-learning and generative-AI models to size steel, concrete, and mass-timber components in real time, with quantity takeoffs and embodied-carbon figures updating as you iterate - so engineers can compare structural options in the earliest, fastest-moving stage of a project without waiting on manual recalculation.
Timber column & beam sizing
Timber is a demanding material to design with - anisotropic, and full of species-, grade-, and size-specific rules. AI Timber Designer sizes timber columns and beams from a few inputs using a generative model, then validates the results with physics-based calculations, so engineers can explore loading and fire scenarios early and export detailed reports to share.
2D structural analysis in the browser
ForceSketch began with a TT principal sketching a structure on a napkin in a meeting and wishing he could get analysis straight from the sketch. It’s now a free, web-based tool that’s nearly as quick as sketching: draw a structure on desktop or mobile, add loads and supports, and get full results (reactions, deflections, moment, shear, and axial forces, plus utilization) in real time. It solves indeterminate structures, runs and compares several models at once, and supports metric and imperial with standard and custom sections, image underlays, dimensioning, and shareable sketches.
Behind it, a Grasshopper definition runs the analysis with Karamba through the ShapeDiver API. TT engineers use it for fast early-stage checks and quick verification; it’s also used to teach students, including in the ACE Mentor Program, and a “mini-game” leaderboard for the lightest structure pushed it to around 1,000 users.
Rapid truss optioneering
In early-stage schematic design, time and resources are tight, which makes it hard to weigh many truss options. Truss Copilot lets Thornton Tomasetti’s engineers explore a wide range of truss designs, optimizing the design parameters and returning strength and deflection results in seconds instead of hours.
Images courtesy of Thornton Tomasetti.
Structural & building services
A multidisciplinary structural, civil, and building services engineering practice with offices in London and Birmingham, with a strong focus on low-embodied-carbon design.
London, UK
Concept-stage structure & embodied carbon
Built by Webb Yates’ computational-design group, Cactus renders a full 3D parametric model of a building, runs a preliminary structural design, and calculates embodied carbon - in about a second. It runs Grasshopper through ShapeDiver’s viewer and backend APIs, so any engineer in the office can weigh structural options and carbon at the concept stage. As Dan Cole, who leads the group, puts it, “it can be used by any engineer in the office due to the accessible user interface”, so engineers get parametric design without needing to know Grasshopper.
Image courtesy of Webb Yates Engineers.
BIM software & services
A supplier and developer of BIM and structural-analysis software, with consulting, implementation, and training services for the construction engineering sector - more than 250 people across Europe and Latin America.
Europe & Latin America
Steel warehouse pre-sizing
Optinave is a free web app from Construsoft for quickly pre-sizing industrial warehouse (“nave”) steel structures. An engineer sets the building geometry and location; Optinave generates wind and snow loads to Eurocode, optimizes the steel structure with the Karamba3D engine, and returns section profiles, a materials list, and downloadable IFC/XML files, with force diagrams, reactions, and deformations to review. Grasshopper plus ShapeDiver let Construsoft put serious engineering plug-ins such as Karamba3D and GeometryGym behind a public, no-install web tool.
Image courtesy of Construsoft.
Precast manufacturing
Precast design-to-fabrication
A European manufacturer of concrete highway noise-cancelling walls used to engineer each wall by hand (PDFs, spreadsheets, and CAD drawings only specialists could interpret), which became a bottleneck as the product rolled out from Austria across Europe. Their ShapeDiver tool turns an uploaded DXF of beams and design curves into a fully modeled wall in the browser: engineers adjust fields, curves, and elements, then export everything manufacturing needs - an overview CAD drawing, a master spreadsheet, a PXML straight into the ERP system, laser-projection files for the shop floor, and a detailed PDF blueprint for every element, 180 of them for one wall. Behind the no-code interface sit a C# core library, a Grasshopper definition, and ShapeDiver.
Engineering consultancy
An independent engineering consultancy founded in 1881 and headquartered in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, with more than 6,000 people working across water, infrastructure, industry, energy, buildings, and maritime.
Amersfoort, Netherlands
Shared engineering platform
Haskoning built WaterFuser - a shared engineering platform where its domain experts turn their own calculation tools into web apps colleagues can actually use. ShapeDiver provides the parametric 3D: an engineer’s Grasshopper model is integrated into WaterFuser through the ShapeDiver Viewer and API, so someone who has never opened Grasshopper can change inputs and watch a fully configurable 3D design update alongside the calculation results.
Haskoning chose ShapeDiver over self-hosting Rhino and Grasshopper (“we don’t need to manage infrastructure,” and “specialization beats generalization”), which keeps their teams small and fast. The first release is in production for one of Haskoning’s own wastewater-treatment technologies, with model versioning and automated drawings on the roadmap.
Image from the webinar “Grasshopper at Scale: Building Engineering Apps with ShapeDiver”, courtesy of the presenters.
Structural engineering
An engineering firm founded in Houston in 1931, with more than 1,250 people in 36 offices, known for structural engineering on long-span sports venues, airports, and healthcare facilities, among others.
Houston, USA
Engineering calculators behind a common API
Walter P Moore built Emulation Lab, an internal “app store for engineering calculators” that hosts the firm’s calculation logic (Python, Grasshopper, and Excel tools) behind a common API. Their ShapeDiver apps call it, so heavy computation runs in Emulation Lab while the ShapeDiver Viewer stays fast and computational designers can focus on the app’s logic and interface. A live example is a parking-structure configurator: build the massing, place cores and ramps, have parking-stall striping computed on demand through Emulation Lab, and export the result. Three engineering teams now build on the same setup, with the parking app in beta.
Image from the webinar “Grasshopper at Scale: Building Engineering Apps with ShapeDiver”, courtesy of the presenters.
Engineering & architecture
A Danish engineering, architecture, and consultancy company founded in 1945, headquartered in Copenhagen and owned by the Ramboll Foundation, with more than 18,000 people.
Copenhagen, Denmark
Noise barriers you can hear
Ramboll’s special bridges and structures team built a noise-barrier app that lets a client not just see a barrier but hear it. Acoustic and structural design usually run separately; this tool combines them, parametric 3D barrier geometry from Grasshopper with the actual sounds modeled by the acoustics team, so you can raise a barrier (say, 9 m), choose a distance from the road, and hear how much the traffic noise drops, with noise-contour maps overlaid. It’s shown to municipalities and residents in an acoustically treated room to make the impact tangible.
Ramboll was also the first team to build a new App Builder widget (sound playback) with ShapeDiver’s help; ShapeDiver then folded it into the open-source App Builder framework, so playing sound can now be defined directly in Grasshopper, without an SDK.
Image from the webinar “Grasshopper at Scale: Building Engineering Apps with ShapeDiver”, courtesy of the presenters.
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AEC / Examples
Each of these teams turned its own engineering know-how into an app the whole organization can use. If you’d like to do the same (yourself, or with our help), start a free trial or talk to us. See the AEC page for how it works for engineering teams.
