MetaBalls in 3D
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 topic worth studying even 10 years after this original post to develop an easy way to create the metaball surfaces. In 2012, thanks to the Grasshopper’s easy interface, I was able to create a series of planes from the “Shortest Path” study quickly.
Grasshopper is an easy and very promising tool for form-finding. I’ve been collecting such experiences for almost 4 years. It is very helpful to construct your own design knowledge. Still, I have no idea if these experiences would lead to proper practice and pedagogy of architecture.
Here is the Metaballs in 3D Grasshopper definition. I created that file in 2012 and it still worked when I checked in 2021. Grasshopper marks some of the components as “Old”. However, they still work as expected.
I am sure that the most obvious question here would be the creation of surfaces, not only the curves. I think there are some tools and add-ons that would do this job. However, I am afraid I don’t have time to install and try them. But I would be glad to create a solution natively inside Grasshopper to do that. A nice Python script can be helpful here. Maybe I will study it in the future.
To conclude, here are some quotes from Greg Lynn, father of the term “Blob Architecture”;
We don’t want to make things look familiar but we do want to look real… to have a cosmic scale but still have gravitational logic.
Greg Lynn, “New City” (Video Lecture) in Seed Design Series, Seed Magazine.
In the end it’s geometry… Visualizing geometry and thinking abstractly was something that came easily. When I went to college I got out of architecture for a while, and majored in philosophy. Then I realized that all the philosophy I was reading was really about form.
Greg Lyenn, Eva Priz (Interviewer). “Interview.” in Index Magazine. 2005
Cite this post
Related Posts
Drops
June 22, 2012
Using SPM Vector Components developed by two talented people, Daniel Hambleton and Chris Walsh (website here), I’ve studied ways of displaying dynamic diagrams of form. I’ve modified an example file and found myself in a surprising formal exploration. It’s like watching the clouds, giving them meaning like a sheep, a flower, a baby… This needs SPM tools to be installed first and includes a timer component. To run the simulation, double-click on the lower toggle (set it to false) and run the timer…
Interlocking Structure with Boolean
August 23, 2026
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…
Slope Map on Terrains
August 18, 2026
I previously shared the Grasshopper definition for terrain generation that we used in last year’s Basic Design studio. One of the goals of this project was to take the first step toward developing students’ skills in understanding, processing, and utilizing terrain data as a design input. To support this objective, we provided them with small supplementary tools. One of these tools was the slope map. As you can see, this is quite a simple Grasshopper definition. It computes the slope…
Catenary Dome without Kangaroo
August 13, 2026
When thinking about serious and specific topics, I suddenly find myself looking back at the basics again. Catenary curves, are not the most beautiful one among those mathematical forms found in nature. However, it still tells us a lot about structures. The name apparently comes from catenaria, the Latin word for “chain”. This Grasshopper code was actually an example from our book 10 years ago (link here). It seems catenary curves could potentially be used in a type of dome…
Terrain Generator
August 13, 2026
Last year, for the midterm assignment in our first-year basic design studio, we gave our students a range of different, randomly generated contexts to work with. For this purpose, I developed a small Grasshopper tool that makes the graph of a function look as much like a terrain model as possible. This tool is not really a procedural terrain generator. I would genuinely like to build one, someday. What we have here is simply a function surface. At the inputs,…