#grasshopper

Today’s fractal is the Julia Set, the amazing simplicity of chaos. There are lots of applets and articles on the internet about this fractal. You can generate this with the iteration of a basic function many times and placing points on the complex plane. I developed a Grasshopper implementation in 2012. Also, this was my first study on complex numbers. At each iteration, the detail level increases. I utilized a common brute-force approach, distributing a grid of points, converting them…

Studying circle packing led me back to my high school days. First, I’ve tried to write a vb.net component so that I would say Grasshopper to place circles and check lots of things iterating again and again. Then I felt that this was not my real interest in circle packing. After finding an old post by Daniel Piker,  I’m truly enlightened about an old topic of our high school education: The complex numbers! Then I found this link, explaining the…

Since last week, I’m very curious about circle packing. There are a couple of complete solutions on the internet. I’m still in the early steps of such a solution yet. A full circle packing means that it does not include any gaps and each circle is tangent to all possible neighbors. Sounds easy in Grasshopper but I couldn’t see any solution yet. There are some circle-packing attempts but they have gaps. Also, I don’t want to use an evolutionary solver…

After a couple of days of studying the mysterious Doyle spiral, I’ve decided to test an approach of circle packing from conformal mapping. First, I tried to understand the Poincare disk (earlier at here, here, and here and here). I used it as the hyperbolic representation of space on a two-dimensional plane. Then, I linked a regular hexagonal grid and rebuilt it after the hyperbolic distortion. This led me to find the below hexagonal grid. Therefore, it looks like a suitable…

We can create tessellations of outer points in a Poincare Disk, using the manual method explained in the last post (here). But repeating that compass and straightedge process is becoming a little useless after a couple of repeats. If you say “ok. I understood the concept, let’s get faster!” then we can model just the same process in Grasshopper3D to examine varying results in seconds; If we connect any grid of points into this definition, we can clearly see the similar…

Previous studies on the timer component were based on understanding its use. This time, I tried to implement it in a geometric design task. Moreover, manipulating the timer component to change the regular animation of parameters. Time does not have to be equally divided into sequences. Rather, new possibilities may emerge with different time flows. A simple triangulation system is developed with a potential manipulation, based on a timer. This definition is exciting and new for me because I’m not…

We can model a musical composition using native Grasshopper components. After the experiments with the timer component (here and here), I managed to build a definition that allows us to produce outputs in various time intervals. I converted a small part of Bach’s Bouree in E-Minor into Grasshopper as a guitar tablature. I used Guitar Pro 5’s MusicXML export function to convert classical guitar tablature into XML data, then organized that file in Excel to suit my data tree design…

Here is today’s improvement on my metronome with the timer component, which started here. It’s straightforward to tell Grasshopper about seconds and organize it according to it. Using an interval smaller than 1 second, this small script catches every second and returns a different value. However, it’s much harder to implement smaller values than seconds. It seemed easy at first sight but getting accurate results smaller than seconds requires working with milliseconds. You can output the current millisecond’s value, but…

This was before Spherical Fantasies, while I was trying to update my surface equation definition. In between designerly intentions and mathematical facts, it’s hard to maintain a process, while keeping the definition yet simple and open to exploration. A little tired of mathematical definitions, I started to give names to the animate surfaces I develop. Like the Spherical one, this is also a trigonometric equation of z = cos(x) + sin(x-y2) / 2. The most boring part of these is…

This is about conforming distortions on surfaces and creating imperfect (say ugly) surfaces. I started with planar surfaces, however, I continued with spherical ones. There are interesting results when applying trigonometric functions to spherical surfaces. Example surface equations: Please be patient if animations are loading slowly. But they represent a way of creating free-form-looking surfaces, highly mathematical behind the scene. As you see, I used the UVW coordinate system of the sphere, subdivided into 20 pieces. W represents the amount…