Fields is a native group of components available since the very early version of Grasshopper. In today’s Design Computing class, we studied it again with the first-year design students. I studied these interesting and beautiful shapes earlier here, here, here, and here. The one you see below is a short in-class exercise about vector fields. The exercise aims to show the Grasshopper’s capabilities in form-finding studies via Field Lines.

The definition starts with the generation of a set of random points in a 2D rectangular region. Then, in other random point sets, Point Charge and Spin Force charges are defined. Then, I merge these charges into a single field. Finally, I create Field Lines from a set of 1000-1500 random points. The vector fields exercise is a good start in understanding grafted lists and their usage. The grafted list of three numbers, fed to the Pop2D component allows the creation of three different sets of random points. Then, the Explode Tree component (BANG!) makes it possible to use these three point sets in their correct operations. The first point set goes to the Spin Force component and the second set to the Point Charge. Finally, the third point set is used in the generation of the field lines. The field lines are graphical representations of the vector field.

I guess that this advanced feature of native Grasshopper is still interesting and worth studying. Our students are learning the intermediate concepts of Grasshopper’s inner mechanics through this and similar exercises.