Workshop: The syntax of wood

Exploring computational design and digital fabrication with the COMPAS framework and the compas_timber package.

👉 Slides

Installation

We will install compas_timber in Rhino and also in a standalone Python environment.

Rhino 8

1. Open Rhino 8, then open the Package Manager (type PackageManager in the command line), and search for compas_timber, install the version 1.0.1.
2. Restart Rhino.
3. Open the example 00_hello_world.gh from the examples folder to test the installation.

Standalone

Install uv as pre-requisite (if you don't have it yet):

On Windows:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"

On MacOS / Linux:

curl -Ls https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

You might need to restart VS Code if it was open during the installation of uv.

Virtual environment

Open VS Code and open a terminal in the folder of this repository.

Create a new virtual environment:

uv venv --python 3.14

Activate it:

On Windows:

.venv\Scripts\activate

On MacOS / Linux:

source .venv/bin/activate

Then, install the package via pip:

uv pip install compas_timber==1.0.1

Finally, test the installation by running the 00_hello_world.py script from the examples folder.

Make sure you select the newly created virtual environment in VS Code before running the script. You can do this by clicking on the Python version in the bottom-left corner of VS Code and selecting the interpreter from the .venv folder.

Resources

• COMPAS Framework
• COMPAS docs
• COMPAS Timber docs
• Slides