ALGORITHMIC SKETCHBOOK
2 0 1 7 SEMESTER 1 STUDIO AIR DONNY LIN
CONTENTS
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Week 1
Basics
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Week 2
2D Patterning & Parametric Walls
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Week 3
Box Morph
Week 4
More Box Morph
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Week 5
Parametric Exercise
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Week 6
Radiation Analysis
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W1
Basics
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This week's sketchbook task is to design a wall or an object. I chose to design a piece of wall. Firstly, I draw a curve in Rhino and do some minor adjustment to it. In this task, I mainly focus on one design but I broke down every step which I made a decision upon.
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I move the curve upwards along the z axis and duplicate it multiple times. Then I apply some adjustments on every curves.
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I open up grasshopper and set the curves into a combined unit. I loft the curves so they form a smooth surface.
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I intended to create some contour lines in both horizontal and vertial directions so I open up the Countour and used the slider to adjust the spacing between each countour lines as desired.
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Since the wall appears to be having no width, here I loft the horizonal contours to create a thickness.
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I repeat the process in which I have done during the wall width lofting. This time it is applied to giving every individual contour lines a nice thickness.
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I repeat the process on contours in another direction. Then I group up the contours and form them into two groups: horizontal and vertical. So it is easier for me to hide one of them and work on another group.
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I colour each groups and in so doing it lets me to identify the contour lines more easily.
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W2
2D Patterning & Parametric Walls
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I was experimenting the attractor pattern. The reason why I insert a 'minimum' component is because I don't want the hexagons attach to each other on their boundaries if they are far away from the attractor point. The division component is used for adjusting the size of the hexagons according to their distance to the point. This step took me quite a while to figure out.
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Here is me experimenting 'random'. I set up a hexagon grid and use the hexagon centre points as the centre of the circles. Random component is used for adjusting the circle's radius between two numbers. And I find it very interesting that the component has a 'seed' input, so I can randomise the circle sizes as I wish.
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Not exactly what this week's task was asking for, but I wanted to create a pattern using Voronoi, like the pattern seen on the walls of Beijing Aquatics Centre. Idea here is to subtract the volume of the hole from the total volume. First, I make a 3D box using the box component (with input of two points). Next, I randomly set a number of points within the area, and use the voronoi component to create the lines along the mid point of each two points. Then, I offset it along the z axis to create a width. I use the extrude component to move the original voronoi lines and the offset line along the z axis to a certain height. Using cap hole component to create 2 sets of volume: the total volume and the volume of the holes. Finally, I use 'solid difference' component to remove the area which is covered twice, and the grid is thus preserved.
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I was still confused about the recipe of this particular parametric wall after week 2 tutorial so I spent some more time on it after the class. I made a cheese like pattern and insert it to the divided box on the surface of a wall.
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W3
Box Morph
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To create a parametric wall using box morph was this week's sketchbook task. But instead of just creating a boring wall using Hexagonal component, I started by actually mapping out the base hexagonal geometry. I did it by adding lines on the end of one line and rotated it by 60 degrees to get the basic shape. Then I extruded it along the y axis getting a nice depth. Then I basically created two hexagonal volume and used the size different component to get that outline. Next, because I wanted to see if I could use image sampler as an 'attractor' point to get some variation on the size of cell opening. But my skill at this moment was not potent enough thus I seeked for help on forum. One kind man helped me out with how to make my dream come dream. I was able to use image to create an attractor point like effect.
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It was not until this point of time I started thinking about probably I could map an entire surface of voronoi pattern onto the surface of a cubic geometry. Thus I began with a surface with several curves which are undulating. This was on purpose because I want to create a feeling of waves. Then I populated the bounding box's surface and used that as a reference to map out the voronoi pattern. I informed the forum several times. However, Ithe result was still not satisfying because the edge of the voronoi skeleton is of 90 degrees sharp edges. Later I discovered that weaverbird plug-in may be able to solve the problem. I successfully map the pattern as well as making the voronoi pattern look softer and similar to blood vessel.
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But perhaps the most exciting thing about this project was that I started to test out how the lighting system work in Rhino. The screenshot belows shows that I created a backing screed but with added reflectivity (just a little) and three sources of light to not make my model look dark on the other side.
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W4
More Box Morph
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This week I only focused on studying this particular recipe. The final result was not actually what I pursued but was discovered by an accident. I was trying to make a ring-like structure and apply bounding box on top and used that for morphing my pre-made module onto it. But later when I out bounding box, all the boxes appeared to be sticking out from the surface. Then I thought that probably could be an interesting result so I inserted a random component to generate the form and it took the number for determining how the cells are extruded in between to numbers. The result was far more exciting than my initial idea.
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W5
Parametric Exercise
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I found the case study which has been used in week 5 tutorial demonstration video fascinating thus I decided to explore this idea. The design is actually surprisingly simple yet very effective in creating visual effects. The recipe used range and a series or circle, and a graph mapper to determine how the circles were positioned inside the boundary. But considering I gave the cull pattern a zero:true, one:false comment, whenever the number which determines the segment cut of the circle was even, the whole pattern became a series of boring strips from the centre to the edge. Thus I locked the slider to odd number making sure that each time I adjusted the parametre, an interesting pattern would be generated. But since the outer edge of the pattern is extending out for quite a long distance, I used the surface difference component cutting off that unwanted section. Only the inner pattern was left.
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This simple recipe was me kept on experimenting what weaverbird can offer. I found the result was simply fascinating but also had so much potential. But one big issue with this kind of structure is that they are quite hard to be fabricated since the entire entity seems like making out of one piece of object. I thought that 3D printin might be good in terms of modelling but perhaps I could keep one exploring the geometry and possibly find one structurally sound but easy to be fabricated by basic tectonics.
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W6
Radiation Analysis
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Just a quick play of testing out the functionality of radiation analysis. Here I inserted our Thrid prototype model to see how the sun impacts the project. And the results turned out that the north-facing side and the top receive the strongest heat, and the south side the least. Albeit the installment will in fact be under water, the effect of the sun is not as strong as above water, it is however a good way to determine if minor adjustment at the top is required. Because fish generally prefer cooler place with less sun light, this might helps us to consider if that change is needed.
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