Code to Concrete: automating kilometres of highway noise walls
A European manufacturer of precast concrete noise barriers for motorways needed to engineer hundreds of panels per project, each with its own shape, from rectangles to parallelograms and trapezoids. ShapeDiver's projects team built a design to production system that lets the manufacturer's own engineers and designers configure complete walls in the browser and generate every production document automatically.
The solution uses a three layer architecture: a C# plugin holds the core geometry and engineering logic, Grasshopper orchestrates data input and output, and a ShapeDiver web application gives non specialist users a simple interface. From one configured wall the system produces overview CAD drawings, master spreadsheets, PXML files for the ERP system, laser projection files for the shop floor and a detailed PDF blueprint for every element, 180 PDFs for a single wall in one example. The approach started in Austria and now supports deployment across Europe.
Key Facts
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Business Impact
- 180 production PDFs per wall, automated
- Panel engineering without specialists
- Scaled from Austria across Europe
Client Name
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Tools Used in the Case Study
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ShapeDiver
ShapeDiver turns Grasshopper definitions into secure web apps and 3D configurators that engineers, architects, clients and fabrication partners run in any browser, with no Rhino licence and no access to the underlying script. AEC firms such as Thornton Tomasetti, Ramboll, Haskoning and Walter P Moore use it to share computational design tools across offices, automate drawings and production files, and connect parametric models to their own software through APIs.
Grasshopper
Grasshopper 3D is the visual programming environment included with Rhino for computational and parametric design. Architects, engineers, façade specialists, and fabricators connect components on a canvas to generate geometry, process data, and test design variables without building every option manually. It works directly with Rhino’s modeling environment and can extend into BIM, analysis, optimization, and fabrication workflows through official integrations, scripting, and plugins.
User Experience
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Why this tool/tech was selected
The manufacturer's growth depended on engineering capacity that was hard to hire: every wall needed specialists who could interpret the geometry and turn it into drawings and data for production. The company wanted a system that its existing engineers and designers could run themselves, without learning Grasshopper or C#.
ShapeDiver made it possible to keep the full engineering logic in a C# plugin and Grasshopper, where computational designers can maintain and extend it, while publishing a clean web interface for everyone else. Computation runs in the cloud, outputs are generated in standard formats that plug into the ERP system and the factory floor, and the geometry logic is never exposed to end users. ShapeDiver's projects team designed and delivered the system end to end, which gave the manufacturer a single partner for the computational design, the cloud platform and the application.
Challenges the Client Faced before
- Every project depended on a small number of experts who could interpret complex panel geometry.
- Hundreds of unique panels per wall had to be tracked manually across drawings and spreadsheets.
- Manual documentation was slow and exposed to transcription errors.
- Expanding from Austria into other European markets multiplied the workload faster than the team could grow.
The previous method used
Panels were engineered by hand. Specialists produced PDFs, spreadsheets and CAD drawings manually for each wall and tracked hundreds of unique concrete elements, their shapes and their properties across separate files.
Time / Money saved & the Business Impact.
The system replaced an expert dependent, manual documentation process with a workflow that engineers and designers can run on their own. A complete wall is configured once in the browser, and the full production package follows automatically: overview drawings, master spreadsheets, ERP data, laser projection files and an individual PDF blueprint for every panel. In one example a single wall produced 180 PDFs that previously had to be drawn by hand.
Because routine panel engineering no longer needs scarce specialists, growth across Europe no longer depends on hiring rare computational experts for every new project. Data flows directly into the ERP system and onto the shop floor, which removes manual re-entry and the errors that came with it, and the C# and Grasshopper logic can be extended as new panel types and markets are added.
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