Algorithms

I want to introduce a concept I came across the other day, one I had never heard of before, along with a few fantastic websites. The Campanus Sphere is essentially a rather crude spherical representation, the kind I’m used to seeing in (very old) computer games, and it also makes a nice nod to 80s disco culture. I also recall that in many older CAD software packages, spheres and sphere-related Mesh objects were represented as polyhedra using this method. However,…

Ever since I restructured designcoding, I’m still sorting through the trash folder. All 580 posts published on the blog have been reviewed, and their files have been uploaded as open source. The mysterious trash folder, where I couldn’t even tell where things belonged, is shrinking fast. While checking this folder yesterday, I found a video. This is probably a simple tutorial I prepared about 10 years ago for the parametric modeling elective course (probably related to this 2012 post). The…

Have you ever thought about making a damped pendulum in Grasshopper? I have no idea why, but I did. I just decided to transfer a Python snippet I found online into a Grasshopper definition. Here, the Initial Angle (Radians) Number slider sets the initial angle to any value from 0 to Pi. The letter G represents the acceleration due to gravity (approximately 9.81 m/s2). This is the primary force pulling the pendulum downward. As you know, pendulums wouldn’t swing without…

How much work we did last year for first-year architectural education! The tensile fabric study we carried out using Grasshopper Kangaroo in “Design Computing”, a first-year course I coordinated alongside my colleague Serkan Uysal, served as a baseline for the material research addressed in the Basic Design studio at that time. Such geometric optimizations in Kangaroo are no longer surprising or novel to anyone. However, experiencing these tools and possibilities in architectural education in the very first year offers a…

While trying to program the curves produced by Spirograph toys in Grasshopper, I took a slightly different path. The topic eventually led to a broader heading: harmonic motion, and from there, to the Fourier Series we looked at previously. This simple Python code models Fourier Synthesis, driven by circles of different radii in a very straightforward way. The Python component sets up a loop that calculates the effect of each circle to the x and y values, individually. In this…

This is the last of the site analysis tools we previously used in the midterm project of first-year architecture education. As you may recall, we previously introduced a tool that generates topographies based on specific parameters. Afterward, we examined two tools that perform slope and flow analyses on these topographies. Today, we are presenting a tool that analyzes curvature. This topic actually constitutes one of the interesting intersection points between architectural design and differential geometry. Curvature is not something architects…

This project randomly stole an entire evening of mine. I didn’t know what the cantellation operation was. After doing some research, I realized it mirrors the process of the dual operation we had previously performed with polyhedra. It turns out to be the process of turning edges into new faces. I started looking for ways to do this in Grasshopper without using ready-made add-ons that include this and similar operations. As always, I had to solve many interesting geometry and…

I’d like to write down an interesting problem here. I remembered this while thinking about this post. It represents one of my favorite, simple pieces of reasoning. I frequently find myself needing to sort a number of points around a center in Grasshopper. Don’t ask why. I realized I’ve been using three different methods to achieve this. The first one that comes to mind is using the Vector Angle component, naturally. All we have to do is supply a plane…

We previously looked at the terrain generator script we used in midterm projects with first-year architecture students over here. Later on, we added a few analysis modules to this tool. You might remember the slope analysis tool from this link. Today’s topic is another type of analysis: flow. The idea for this code wasn’t actually mine; I developed it by looking at an existing script based on Serkan Uysal’s suggestion. Unfortunately, I don’t know who originally wrote it. Keeping track…

You are seeing the last of the interlocking system trials that I have previously tested in two exercises. If you remember, in our first trial, we were drawing interlocking joinery details on cross-sections using closed curves, without any solid modeling. And here is the most advanced one, I guess. In this exercise, however, we are creating a solid model that incorporates these interlocking details. This time, we will look at how to construct the same system using Boolean operations. Boolean…