Solar Analysis including Occlusion

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 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…

This is the final Grasshopper sketch of our graduate studio conducted together with Fulya Akipek at Yıldız Technical University Computational Design Unit. The project was about designing parametric “Landscape Extensions” at Kabataş Park in İstanbul. I hope I’ll be able to post the actual student works and the material system, but now; only the final result of the digital sketch we’ve developed together with students is presented here. This was a kind of “sketchy” definition that came up as an…

Here is a short series of videos showing the basic usage of Ladybug tools in a canopy design. So, I prepared this for my Parametric Design Systems elective course. Then, I encouraged my students to design their own canopies utilizing a similar Ladybug workflow in Grasshopper. In this first video, I am building a test surface in Grasshopper. I use the Graph Mapper component to derive 3D points and Interpolated curves. Finally, the EdgeSrf component is used to model the…

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…

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…