Design your facade knowing what it means for carbon and sun.
Facet turns your Rhino massing into a detailed facade model in minutes. Start from one of 70+ frameworks with real thicknesses and materials, and make it your own without scripting. Watch embodied carbon, glazing ratio and U-value update as you design, and check the sun on the glass in seconds.
Built by a former Snøhetta architect · 1 plugin, zero other dependencies · Same input, same facade — every time · Real weather data from PVGIS
Start
Start from a facade framework.
Don't start from scratch. Pick a framework in the gallery: mullions, panels, fins, real thicknesses and materials, complete in seconds, on your geometry.
Apply
Apply it to your massing and keep modelling.
Select your surfaces and apply the framework. They stay linked: trim an opening, split a surface or change the massing with Rhino’s own tools, and the facade rebuilds around it.
Drive
Design every element.
Every design decision from the controller, in the viewport — spacing, floor heights, headers, depths, direction. A change takes the time it takes to watch it happen.
Sliders are only the start. Draw a fin, frame or profile section yourself with Rhino's normal tools, and Facet applies it along the whole element.
Measure
See what every choice costs in carbon.
Glazing %, embodied CO₂/m², U-value — live beside the design, recomputed as you make changes, no export, no second application. Hover any number for the breakdown by element, so you know what's driving it while you can still act on it.
Every base material links to its ÖKOBAUDAT 2024-II dataset (EN 15804+A2), and you choose which life-cycle stages count. Load your office's assemblies in the Material Editor and the numbers are yours, not generic.
Shade
See how much sun your shading stops.
Run the sun analysis and see how much sun your fins, louvers or frames keep off the glass, in percent and by sky direction. Change the geometry and run it again: you see which changes actually make a difference.
Assign a PV material and Facet shows which panels get enough sun to be worth fitting, with a first estimate of their yield. The weather is a typical year for your site from PVGIS, or your own EPW file.
Customize
Open the framework in Grasshopper.
Change the logic, not just the values. Every framework opens as a full Grasshopper definition — unlocked, same clean, predictable structure every time. The scripts are organized by element, so you know exactly where to go.
Use Facet's Grasshopper components to extend the frameworks or create your own. Name a slider with a leading dot and it appears in the controller.
Engineered and tested
A carbon number is only as real as the model under it.
Your facade has to be right, not just look right. Facet's frameworks are built and tested to give you the same facade twice, survive tomorrow's change to the massing, and tell you what it's made of. That is why the numbers hold, and why you won't have to rebuild the model. They're open, too, so you stay in control.
Built for real-world inputs.
Trimmed, with openings, curved, one surface or many: your facade survives early design without a day of debugging. Every framework runs against the same set of test inputs before it ships.
Clean Breps, even on curves.
Bake and the facade becomes normal Rhino geometry: clean Breps on a layer per element, on straight and curved surfaces alike. Every object carries its element, material and area, length or volume, ready for schedules and export.
Real build-ups, real thicknesses.
Every element in the preview has a material. Walls are real build-ups: pick one and the facade takes its thickness, its U-value (calculated per EN ISO 6946) and its embodied CO₂, layer by layer. Start from the built-in library or add your own.
Repeating panels bake as blocks.
Facet finds every panel that repeats and bakes it as an instance of one block. Edit the block once and every copy follows, the file stays light, and the part count is honest.
Pricing
One plan, everything included. Priced per seat, shared by the whole office.
Questions and Answers
Where do the carbon numbers come from?
From the materials in the model: every element with a material counts. The base materials use generic datasets from ÖKOBAUDAT 2024-II (EN 15804+A2), Germany’s public database for building materials, and each one links to its dataset. You choose which life-cycle stages are added up. The default is A1–A3 + C3 + C4, production plus end of life. These are early-design estimates for comparing options, not a life-cycle assessment.
How is the sun calculated?
From real sun positions and a typical weather year for your site, from PVGIS or your own EPW file. Facet compares the glass with and without your facade’s own geometry and shows how much less sun reaches it, per side of the building. It measures the sun arriving at the glass, not the room behind it.
Is this AI?
No. Nothing is generated. No black box, no hallucinations. Same input, same output, every parameter yours.
What surfaces does it work on?
Vertical surfaces and polysurfaces — curved, trimmed, polygonal, one or many at a time. Sloping and horizontal aren’t supported.
My team doesn't know Grasshopper.
They don’t need to. Everything runs from the controller in the Rhino viewport. Grasshopper is there when someone wants it, not before.
Contact: Anything else — thomas@facet3d.com