#grasshopper

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…

Three-dimensional concrete printing (3DCP) is an innovative digital fabrication and automation technique based on additive manufacturing that enables the creation of complex and customized structures in the architecture and construction industry. Its most notable advantages include eliminating formwork costs and labor (Buswell et al., 2020; Lyu et al., 2021; Kaliyavaradhan et al., 2022) and facilitating the fabrication of structural elements with complex curvatures, particularly in printing systems utilizing industrial robotic arms (Alabbasi et al., 2023; De Soto et al., 2018)….

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…

We continued the previous week’s experiments with Efecan. Using the sandblasting tool, we started performing point and line tests. The Grasshopper script I developed for this process is below. It allows us to move the gun along defined paths or execute target shots at specific points. To mount the IBIX pressurized gun onto the Kuka KR-20 model robot, I 3D-printed a custom adapter using PETG. Although it required a bit of force, the gun fits tightly into the adapter; it…

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…

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,…

While digging through my archives, I found an old animation I made in 2023. Back then, I was generating patterns with Parakeet. Thanks to this talented add-on, I managed to create a nice pattern by dressing a different component onto a Snub Square tiling base. However, for some reason, things started turning into a horror movie after that. MultiPipe was popular back then. So, I converted this pattern into surfaces using MultiPipe and attempted an animation using Rhino’s rendered viewport…

Today, Efecan and I attached the sandblasting device to the robotic arm. The device sprays a special sandblasting material onto surfaces using air pressure. Thus, it is used for cleaning moldy and dirty surfaces in buildings under restoration. Under normal conditions, the sandblasting gun is controlled manually. If the cleaning is too light, it remains insufficient, but it shouldn’t be so intense as to erode the stone either. Normally, the operator performs this control visually. Here, the potential uses for…

Exploring dual polyhedra in Grasshopper is an interesting topic. In this post, I try to generate the dual of any polyhedron using Rhino Python and possibly Grasshopper. I developed this code for Rhino Python earlier here, and now I have converted it into a Grasshopper-Python component for better usability. I start the process by breaking the polyhedron into individual faces and gathering the corner points of each face. These points become the vertices of the dual polyhedron. Then, for each…

String art is a cool art technique that combines geometry and aesthetics to recreate images using lines between pins. Here is a good reference to start studying it. In this post, I explored a custom Rhino Python script designed for Rhinoceros 7 and 8. It transforms a grayscale image into a dense web of threads. The algorithm analyzes the darkest areas of the image and connects pins in a circular layout to form compositions. The script begins by converting a…