#grasshopper

Galapagos was a great improvement when it became available natively within Grasshopper as an Evolutionary Solver. However, I couldn’t find time to examine it until recently. This examination gave me an idea of algorithmic thinking, tool making, and tool using. The first experiment shown below tries to solve equilateral triangulation, based on the Delaunay method. Galapagos has two different solvers, named “simulated annealing solver” and “evolutionary solver” shown respectively below. Both of them are trying to reach a fitness value…

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…

Today, there are pedagogical and practical challenges on the use of algorithms in architectural design, as computer puts not only a physical but also a cognitive layer between designer and the subject. Formulation of this cognitive layer is becoming important, regarding which model of computing is used to connect designer with the subject. Is it a “designerly” search, or design exploration in a visual programming environment? As most of the researchers admit that visual programming environments are very effective in generating variations,…

This is the continuation of my scripting experiment within Grasshopper. Like the minimum spanning tree algorithm, this is also a famous problem of computational geometry; the shortest path problem. I’m now coding faster and understanding the namespace more easily in Grasshopper. This time, the challenge was implementing Dijkstra’s algorithm for the Shortest Path Generator. Again, it’s a quite powerful algorithm, I even plan to use it in my current project. Although there is a faster alternative, Shortest Walk-in Food4Rhino and it…

This is the basic form of a surface division, based on curvature. As each point on the surface has a curvature value, this might be used to dispatch those values and see the points at flat and curved parts of the surface. I used my favourite surface equation definition (here) as implemented equation of cos(x)+cos(y) in the animation below.

This is the updated version of my MST code from 2012. After over a hundred hours of Rhinocommon and Grasshopper SDK studies, and lots of dead ends, I was finally able to calculate the minimum spanning tree of any given curve network in Grasshopper. Problems like these are interesting to me because of their clear logic and diverse areas of applications in design. I tried to simulate Dijkstra’s, Kruskal’s, and Prim’s algorithms, but no chance. There are similar solutions such…

Trying to further improve my experience in parametric modeling, I’m mixing and joining old definitions to reveal different potentials. I’m experiencing spatial mapping or morphing in Grasshopper. This is an equivalent form of the “flow along surface” command in Rhinoceros. It re-builds a geometric composition over another space (from world XY coordinates onto a surface with UV coordinates here) This is especially useful in creating surface compositions from famous tessellations such as Voronoi. There are lots of things I can…

Another famous shape of architectural geometry is a set of definitions creating minimal surfaces. I’ve found the trigonometric equation of the Gyroid and created a simple logic for approximating it as points in Grasshopper. However, when I searched the net for similar solutions, I found lots of them including the same approach as mine (Wynstan Wu’s definition). I was planning to develop a script in Grasshopper to take these estimated points and pull them to the Gyroid surface. Then, I…

Today, we’ve finished first phase, the introduction to dataflow management in visual programming environments; and conducted “well defined” part of the mid-term examination. First two questions were designed to test technical skills of data matching, geometric evaluation. First one was a simple algorithm that calculates the area of ANY triangle in real-time. Tricky part of this problem was to research and find ways of calculating area and implementing it in Grasshopper. Most obvious formula, “a x h / 2” is…

As far as I understood, it is impossible to physically construct double-curved surfaces from quadrilateral and planar faces. This definition tries to find an optimized alternative to this problem. Any surface, single or double curved, is divided into standard sub surfaces. But this time, those surfaces are treated as planar surfaces, therefore one corner is moved to meet this requirement. The output consists of only planar surfaces ready for fabrication. There are potential improvements to this definition such as finding…