#terrain

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…

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,…

Here is a short tutorial on getting help from Grasshopper in physical terrain modeling. It is a classical architectural terrain modeling process. Let’s see how Grasshopper can help us with this. Part 1: Terrain modeling for Laser cutter The terrain model entered in the Brep data store in this application is a closed/solid model. For now, you can also use ready-made components such as Cone or Sphere (Sph) to quickly produce a solid model. In this application, after we obtained…

The dwg format maps in Turkey are often problematic. You need to clean these for architectural studios. Maps mostly contain height information of buildings. But the contours of the buildings are distorted and polylines are generally exploded. The map of the region where we worked in the studio I conducted in the Fall 2021 term was also problematic. I created a Map Cleaner Script in Rhino Python and converted the building drawings on the map into solid 3D models. We…

Site models could be calculated for laser cutting easily using Grasshopper’s native components. This definition was a practical one we created in the Parametric Modeling course to see that Grasshopper could also be utilized to prepare fabrication documents not generating design outcomes. However, this definition is a draft one and could be improved more by putting labels inside of each cut piece, trimming the edges properly and so on. It is good news for students at least that they have a…

This video is dedicated to Design Computing and Basic Design students, who “contour” and then move each section by hand in Rhino. They do it individually to fabricate their laser-cut homework from cardboard. It could also be a macro but I prefer this. Because it does not work in all conditions. Maybe you should orient your contouring results similar to those shown in the video, and then use the shear command to spread them. I called this method “shear magic”. Let’s…