#grasshopper

This is another popular “math surface” being rediscovered by designers nowadays, in 2012. Saddle surfaces, seen above as mentioned earlier (here) have a special type named “Monkey Saddle Surface”. This surface was a dramatic example of how Grasshopper can control equations and instantly show graphical results. The mathematical equations start with Z=… this makes it very easy for us to transform any x-y grid centers (a 2d data tree of 3d points) and add z values to them according to…

I tried different approaches to drawing platonic solids using Grasshopper’s native components. However, it seems impossible now. In geometric definition, a platonic solid is a set of points, distributed on a sphere with equal distances. If the set contains 12 points, then it’s an icosahedron. I found lots of information about these objects and mathematicians seem to love analyzing them. They created different approaches to building an icosahedron. One of them is very suitable to implement on Grasshopper’s VB component….

Here are some results of fourth homework. An animate design sketch of a roof structure. Yağız, Deniz and Sacha created animated results; Derya and Sacha proposed conventional approaches to create “openings” by animating geometries. However, that does not meet the requirement of structural (and logical) intentions of the design problem. Unless some very high-tech materials were introduced to design. On the other hand, Yağız tried to create a structure that looks more like real. This exercise showed us that in…

After Puzzling, I tried to establish more of Escher’s basic grid transformations using Grasshopper’s native components. This definition simulates Escher’s transformation of four-cornered grids. The postulate is based on the fact that every quadrilateral (or triangular) planar shape can create regular tessellations without gaps or overlaps. In the traditional method, this tessellation is achieved by rotating the shape 180 degrees and copying afterward. However, in Grasshopper we simply define the fifth point for each shape and divide subsurfaces into four…

After a reviewing a short story of digital architecture from Branko Kolarevic, we looked at the roots of the theory and the concepts derived from it such as digital fabrication, building information modeling and parametric modeling. After a short brief, we’ve discussed about the final projects. Next week, we’ll start studying final projects and start to look at individual problems developed from them. Final submissions will highly be related with their design problem; it might be only digital animations, or…

Nowadays, I found myself back into traditional hand sketching. Several failed attempts on Grasshopper led me back there. NURBS (and Grasshopper) somehow limits our conception of surfaces to four-cornered (or two-directional) manifolds. Although it sounds like limiting our designs, having four-cornered component spaces has still lots of experimental fields for designers. Escher is a cult person, who transforms the euclidean coordinate system to meet his design intentions. There are lots of interesting research about him, and he shows us how…

This topic of trees and recursive computing is inspired by the method shown here at the Rhino Python 101 Primer. This is a beautiful method of recursion that creates tree-like shapes, composed of arcs. I constructed these arcs by using the Arc SED (start, end, direction) method. This requires start and end points and a vector that is tangent to the arc (at the start point). Therefore, the overall look of a chain of these constructions creates curves with continuous…

Today, we’ve discussed ways of subdividing entities to create parametric definitions. Curves can be divided into segments, creating snake-like object definitions. This exercise is important regarding the management of data. Vectors and planes are used as reference entities here. Nowadays, it became clear to me that, reference planes are very important because they both include reference points and related vectors as well. The definition studied in this post includes a curve subdivision and a combination of vector / plane management to…

This was an interesting topic in design computing class. Geometric constructions based on strict relationships are becoming exciting in parametric modeling environments. I think muqarnas includes such a relationship. There is a primary method of modeling this shape, introduced by Mete Tüneri. His solution to a simple parametric muqarnas object includes a surface with six reference points, with two boolean differences (one cylinder and one box) creating the component. In Grasshopper, I tried to simulate his process by adding real-time…

SPEC disappeared from our garden suspiciously. Hopefully, we’ve already finalized its parametric survey. Can create the original model by measuring exact corner coordinates. Then, it manipulated shape by creating diverse vectors for each shape. Emre has also tried a similar approach. Can be definition was too long, and did not use data trees, therefore it is slow. But it’s very effective at offering a solution for animation. I re-captured his frames for animation: Another innovative solution came from Yağız along…