A lot of AEC models involve repeated instances of the same object. Hypar supports
ElementInstance
s, which are lightweight duplicate instances of another object. The Hypar plug-in for Grasshopper has a couple of special components for working with Element Instances:
Construct Element Instance
This component accepts a reference to another element, and a list of transforms:
Element Instances are just a special kind of Element, so you can add them directly to your model output.
This component works well with data trees — you can supply a grafted list of the base components and one branch of transforms for each element you want to make instances from.
Deconstruct Element Instance
You can deconstruct element instances, such as those retrieved from a model dependency, with the normal
Deconstruct Element
component, but it is likely to be more useful and performant to use the specialized Deconstruct Element Instance
componentSince a given model might contain Instances of different types,
Deconstruct Element Instance
supports a Type filter — so you only process instances of a given base element type. The component structures a data tree: 1 branch of transforms for every base definition, similar to how
Construct Element Instance
works. This makes it easy to construct new instance elements based on other instances received from elsewhere.