Tools and Languages

Not all of them, but when you get the idea, you’ll see there are lots of different alternatives for creating Fuller’s famous Geodesic Domes (Although in fact, he is not the inventor of it). I was playing with Platonic Solids in Rhino and realized that…

Playing with the 2D Metaball component in Grasshopper. I was curious about why there are no Metaballs in 3D in Grasshopper. Then, I realized that in fact, the 2D Metaball component is creating a section of a 3D Metaball computation. I think it is a…

Basic Design Studio at Bilgi University is coming to semester’s big final. Nowadays, students are trying to build their final projects. Oğuz and Gupse’s group has a truss structure with nearly 800 segments. They attempt to build it by taking length values from their own…

Galapagos was a great improvement when it became available natively within Grasshopper as an Evolutionary Solver. However, I couldn’t find time to examine it until recently. This examination gave me an idea of algorithmic thinking, tool making, and tool using. The first experiment shown below…

The 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 address) a much quicker way of modeling a Tetrahedron using a cube. It’s very simple, just connecting the…

Experimenting with various plug-ins for solar calculations, I found Daniel Da Rocha’s robust implementation of the solar position algorithm in vb.net. It calculates the solar angle of any place and time. Although it’s written in the old vb.net component, it still works great. I’m trying…

This is the continuation of my scripting experiment within Grasshopper. Like the minimum spanning tree algorithm, this is also a famous problem of computational geometry; the shortest path problem. I’m now coding faster and understanding the namespace more easily in Grasshopper. This time, the challenge was…

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…

This is the updated version of my MST code from 2012. After over a hundred hours of Rhinocommon and Grasshopper SDK studies, and lots of dead ends, I was finally able to calculate the minimum spanning tree of any given curve network in Grasshopper. Problems…

Trying to further improve my experience in 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 the “flow along surface” command in Rhinoceros. It re-builds a geometric composition…

Another famous shape of architectural geometry is a set of definitions creating minimal surfaces. I’ve found the trigonometric equation of the Gyroid and created a simple logic for approximating it as points in Grasshopper. However, when I searched the net for similar solutions, I found…

When I was a student, 3D modeling and rendering on the computer was an advanced skill. I only managed to create my first rendering in the 4th-year project.  Then, it became a special talent for designers, even opening a freelance business. However, that came to…

As far as I understood, it is impossible to physically construct double-curved surfaces from quadrilateral and planar faces. This definition tries to find an optimized alternative to this problem. Any surface, single or double curved, is divided into standard sub surfaces. But this time, those…

This is another popular “math surface” being rediscovered by designers nowadays, in 2012. Saddle surfaces, seen above as mentioned earlier (here) have a special type named “Monkey Saddle Surface”. This surface was a dramatic example of how Grasshopper can control equations and instantly show graphical…

QuickShaper (QS) an experimental computer utility for Shape Grammars. It aims to assist designers and students in creating and exploring rule-based designs. QS is first presented and published with Birgül Çolakoğlu at the 25th eCAADe Conference held at Frankfurt / Germany in September 29th, 2007….

I tried different approaches to drawing platonic solids using Grasshopper’s native components. However, it seems impossible now. In geometric definition, a platonic solid is a set of points, distributed on a sphere with equal distances. If the set contains 12 points, then it’s an icosahedron….

[RFA: Revit 2012] It seems simple at first sight, but creating a window definition in Revit requires a lot more time than I expected. A freelance job led me to create this parametric object, when I saw the architect’s sketch of all window types of…

This is another old-school approach to parametric modeling, today known better as part of Building Information Modeling. I tried to create parametric objects in order to understand and learn the capabilities of Revit.  That was very useful for me in learning this interface. I specially…

After Puzzling, I tried to establish more of Escher’s basic grid transformations using Grasshopper’s native components. This definition simulates Escher’s transformation of four-cornered grids. The postulate is based on the fact that every quadrilateral (or triangular) planar shape can create regular tessellations without gaps or…

Nowadays, I found myself back into traditional hand sketching. Several failed attempts on Grasshopper led me back there. NURBS (and Grasshopper) somehow limits our conception of surfaces to four-cornered (or two-directional) manifolds. Although it sounds like limiting our designs, having four-cornered component spaces has still…