Tetrahedron is a popular platonic solid for designers. We’ve explained how to draw them using equilateral triangles here before. Recently I’ve found (sorry, lost the web adress) a much quicker way of modeling a Tetrahedron using a cube. It’s very simple, just connecting the three opposite corners of the cube automatically makes them equal, resulting the four equal faces. Of course this time you’ll have to calculate the actual edge length, but if you use “box diagonal” command, you’ll also have opportunity to set the edge length of the tetrahedron. [...]

…While it is true that every curve which can be described by a continuous motion should ve recognized in geometry, this does not mean that we should use at random the first one that we meet in the construction of a given problem. We should always choose with care the simplest curve that can be used in the solution of a problem, but it should be noted that the simplest means not merely the one most easily described, nor the one that leads to the easiest demonstration or construction of [...]

Digging out with Grasshopper, Rhinoscript and Paneling Tools, everything seems to be more and more automated and fast. However my colleagues Mete, Benay and Elif reminded me that, we can always do much with those high-end architectural geometry tools; but we still have to understand and follow the roots, probably best described by the “manual ways”. Sometimes using these methods would be much more intuitive as they are SLOW enough for designers to think about what is going on there… Here is a good example we experimented with our undergraduate [...]

After six months of operation, designcoding.net started to give me some clues about the social network of design computing on WWW. Here are the live statistics of this website. I’m also curious about how this network of knowledge and style are constructed and spread around the globe. In the past ten years, there are a number of new nodes on this network, emerged outside of institutional education. Although this website is concentrated on only one aspect of the contemporary design paradigm, maybe it will also start evolving and give much [...]

Experimenting various plug-ins for solar calculations, I found Daniel Da Rocha‘s powerful implementation of solar position algorithm in vb.net. It calculates the solar angle of any place and time. Although it’s written in old vb.net component, it still works great. I’m trying to create a fast and easy workflow to optimize Grasshopper models based on solar directions. This is done by projecting faces to the solar planes and checking how much of their area is included in that direction. After this check I added a color gradient to see the [...]

Today, there are pedagogical and practical challenges on the use of algorithms in architectural design, as computer puts not only a physical but also a cognitive layer between designer and the subject. Formulation of this cognitive layer is becoming important, regarding which model of computing is used to connect designer with the subject. Is it a “designerly” search, or design exploration in a visual programming environment? As most of the researchers admit that visual programming environments are very effective in generating variations, but on the other hand, it dramatically changes the way [...]

[GHX: 0.8.0066] This is the continuation of my scripting experiment within Grasshopper. Like minimum spanning tree algorithm, this is also a famous problem of computational geometry. I’m now coding faster and understanding the namespace easier in Grasshopper. This time, challenge was to implement Dijkstra’s algorithm of shortest paths. Again, it’s a quite useful algorithm, I even plan to use it in my current project. Although there is a faster alternative, Shortest Walk, I’m happy with this result. Like minimum spanning tree, this script also possibly contains bugs and miscalculations. E.g. in [...]

A note about this blog; Should I feel comfortable with all these experiments? I learn so many things here, as I get deeper into this world. Trying to understand and construct a knowledge for myself and my undergraduate students, at the same time, trying to make it as a research diary also for anyone else; understandable, and open.  designcoding.net tries to express things “as they are”. That’s why there are no “classy complex” renderings of “algorithmic beauty”, showing things as if they are something else, or more than themselves. Briefly, [...]

This is the basic form of a surface division, based on curvature. As each point on the surface has a curvature value, this might be used to dispatch those values and see the points at flat and curved parts of the surface. Here is the Grasshopper definition [GHX: 0.8.0066] (Please use right click + save target as to download ghx definitions in this site. Otherwise your browser may try to execute them as they are xml files). I used my favourite surface equation definition (here) as implemented equation of cos(x)+cos(y) in the animation [...]

This was a tough job for me to understand scripting in Grasshopper. After over a hundred hours of Rhinocommon and Grasshopper SDK studies, and lots of dead ends, I was finally able to tell Grasshopper to calculate minimum spanning tree of any given curve network. The problems of minimum spanning tree and shortest path in graphs are very interesting for me because of their clear logic and wide area of applications in design. However Grasshopper seems to be incapable of implementing such algorithms using it’s native components. I tried to [...]

Trying to further improve my experience on parametric modeling, I’m mixing and joining old definitions to reveal different potentials. I’m experiencing spatial mapping, or morphing in Grasshopper. This is an equivalent form of “flow along surface” command in Rhinoceros. It re-builds a geometric composition over another space (from world XY coordinates onto a surface with UV coordinates here) This is especially useful in creating surface compositions from famous tesselations such as Voronoi. There are lots of things I can do with this functionality. Here is the first example of reconstructing [...]

Searching for a meaning to today’s popular design methods and concepts we are all going after. Most of the abstract problems, today described within architectural domains, are very paralell to another field defined by M. Ian Shamos in 1978. Here is the introduction paragraph of his phD thesis; Geometry is a subject that has captured the imagination of Man for at least 2500 years. It is at the very foundation of Art, Architecture, and Mathematics, and plays a central role in a host of other areas. Computer Science, by contrast, [...]

Another very famous shape for the new era of architectural geometry is a set of definitions creating minimal surfaces. I’ve found trigonometric equation of Gyroid and created a simple logic to estimate it as points in Grasshopper. However when I seached net for similar solutions, I’ve found LOTS of it including the same approach with me (Wynstan Wu’s definition). I was planning to develop a script in Grasshopper to take these estimated points and pull them to the exact positions a Gyroid equation requires. Then, I found that even there [...]

When I was a student, 3D modeling and rendering on computer was an advanced skill. I only managed to create my first rendering at 4th year project.  Then, it became a special talent for designers, even opening a freelance business. However that came to an end when that technology has expanded, reaching to everybody. Ten years ago, different ecological analysis methods on geometric designs were also another specialized field that everybody doesn’t have access to. Now it seems those technological skills are becoming more and more user-friendly, and free. Although [...]

Today, we’ve finished first phase, the introduction to dataflow management in visual programming environments; and conducted “well defined” part of the mid-term examination. First two questions were designed to test technical skills of data matching, geometric evaluation. First one was a simple algorithm that calculates the area of ANY triangle in real-time. Tricky part of this problem was to research and find ways of calculating area and implementing it in Grasshopper. Most obvious formula, “a x h / 2″ is used generally. In that scenario, finding “h” in any triangle [...]