This is the final project of group 2 at İstanbul Bilgi University Faculty of Architecture Basic Design II Spring 2012 undergraduate studio*. 1:1 material system is constructed by two layers of tesselfations, triangular and hexagonal. They studied much for the connection detail and elaborated the structure to maintain stasis within a dynamic pose. They have used a Grasshopper definition (described here) to label and measure all of 800 rods into Excel. Very hard work, intellectually and physically has finished. Congratulations!…

I’ve worked a little more about the Solar Position definition I’ve started here. The definition uses Danel da Rocha’s beautiful solar position script and utilizes it with other components. It creates visual output for any given surface, divided into quads (with side faces of course) and coloring according to their orientation to the sun. This time I added an occlusion part to calculate the surface’s own shadow. Now, the solar calculation takes surfaces as obstacles and dispatches the occluded faces…

I recently discovered Wordle, a visualization tool for websites. I’m very curious about the social network of design computing community. Trying to understand the trends, how the knowledge is spreading, and the role of different actors on this developing field of architectural design. First of all, I analyzed designcoding.net with all words within 103 posts until today (Click on the image for full size). Wordle can be visited by clicking here. Below is the grasshopper3d.com’s wordle result. I suspect it’s rss…

Here are several passages from Shamos’s dissertation thesis, where he is studying the history of geometry from the perspective of a computer scientist. This topic always fascinated me. However, this is a good reading for the algorithmic roots of geometry. …Egyptian and Greek geometry were masterpieces of applied mathematics. It is well established that the original motivation for tackling geometric problems was the need to tax lands accurately and fairly and to erect buildings (Eves, 72)… Euclid’s chief contribution to…

Here I am testing the nesting. RhinoNest is a plug-in for Rhino and a set of components for Grasshopper. I tested it using my old interlocking fabrication definition (here) and (here). I downloaded RhinoNest from this website and installed it. However, I sounded a little complicated at first sight. Then I found a sample definition (here) and modified it a little bit to meet my purposes. First of all, I added orientation components (grey group below) to align all sections to the WorldXY…

I have come across several high school topics I was afraid of. While I was searching for a geodesic dome definition in Grasshopper, it was quite surprising that I found an easier way of modeling an approximation of icosahedron, the famous platonic solid. Icosahedron was a research topic of this website at various posts before (here, here, and here). In order to generate geodesic spheres, first I had to solve icosahedron. My first experiment was partially successful. I knew icosahedron’s…

Yesterday, Kağan asked me about the isovist component in Grasshopper and how it works. In fact, it is a long story, I said because once upon a time, I was curious about Space Syntax theory as my old friend Ela Çil introduced it. So, here is an original definition of Michael Benedikt: “The environment is defined as a collection of visible actual surfaces in space. An isovist is the set of all points visible from a given vantage point in…

Creating and handling new types of grid configurations might be an important topic, as Grasshopper is not supporting them natively (yet). I tried to create some semi-regular tessellations based on regular grids. It is actually truncated versions of regular grids, but it slowly becomes interesting as I realized that I may further truncate emerging grids to create Level 2 and Level 3 grids with more complex tessellations. Here are two examples of Level 1, truncating regular tessellations of squares and…

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 the “Pull” command is very useful in subdividing objects. I modeled this in Rhino 4. First, take a regular Icosahedron and divide it. Because, this is the simplest way for modeling a Geodesic sphere, by…

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…