Arch 218 Delicate Rhino Craig Dias
Table of Contents
WOT I Learned - 0 Petting a Rhino - 1 21st Century Origami - 2 Boolean’d Trimmings - 3 Convoluted Curvature - 4 Trouble with Pronunciation - 5
Coming from a background in polygonal modeling, working with Rhino has been incredibly liberating. So many of the constraints that cling to you as you mash polygons together have dissappeared, effortlessly lifted away by a hulking Rhino. Edge loops are a thing of the past, the torturous process of merging countless verts together nothing but a painful memory. Much of the work I’ve done over this past semester seems like things that would have been impossible to create with polys. It’s not that it would be technically impossible of course; you could easily model any of these projects with polygons. What would have been impossible, in my view, is having the freedom of creativity that Rhino affords by solely using Nurbs, being a program dedicated to Nurbs, which rids itself of many of the technical constraints that polygons bring with it. My biggest surprise has been the ability to create both smooth, curvy organic surfaces in the same breath as I make hard edged geometric surfaces. When working with polys it can be incredibly painful to create complex, organic shapes. At best you’re making an impression of a curved surface, multiple planar faces rotated round. In the worst case scenario you have millions of faces rotate round in every which way, giving you a
smooth looking surface but decimating your GPU. With Nurbs, one curve netoworked to another gives a clean smooth result at little to no cost in setup time or processing. Coupled with the fact that this curved surface can then be seamlessly joined to hard edged geometry was fucking mindblowing! While I know 3Ds Max does have the capability to use Nurbs, my guess would be that because Rhino is dedicated to Nurbs, it is far more sophisticated at using them. The Make2D function has been the second biggest astonishing feature of Rhino that I have learned. The possibilities with this function to make clean, stylized sections and plans alone is awesome. Being able to take 2D vector snapshots of any model from any angle is flat out amazing to me. Previously when doing layouts for a final project, I felt limited in the material I could use to present my work, mostly coming down to some clean renders and 2D sections and plans done in Illustrator. 2D drawings from different angles was “possible” but my own drawing skills aren’t really presentation quality, especially if the subject is more demanding, complex geometries. The Make2D fuction opens this door, allowing for stylized representations of a model to made quite painlessly. This has been a huge boon for
presentation boards; the “cell shaded” look really complements renders and plans, making it easy to communicate and present a project clearly.
That prints to a vector’d PDF that can be used straight in Illustrator?!! What the hell?!!!!
At this point I think I’ll just do a brief list of some other awesome little tools I’ve found
-Orient – Really like this little tool, comes in surprisingly handy for matching shapes up exactly on the mark.
Osnaps – Freaking also awesome. Allowed me to snap to points I didn’t even know I wanted to snap to! I was snapping to points I hadn’t even heard of! Tangents of circles, knots, curves, the ends of curves, the middle of curves! Goddamnit I have to say it....oh snap!
-Trim/Split – Fun to use, though they may have only specific uses. Do like how it makes a clean cut through just about anything leaving behind a clean edge and the shape you want. Really good for abstract sculpting and just fun to play around with.
-Tab – Handy little command that I use all the time. While creating lines, being able to lock the vector/angle of the given drawn line is awesome. Whether for making a complex planar shape ofr just doing a straight line, really handy.
Basically, Rhino has completely replaced every program I’ve used previously for any 3D modeling I need to do in the future. Typing individual commands into the command line took a sec to get used to; some form of a more user-friendly GUI might be helpful for finding specific commands, much like Maya’s “spacebar” menu.
-Booleans/Curve Booleans – Just being allowed to boolean just about anything and have Rhino be totally fine with it. Awesome. -Layers w/Print – Also also awesome. Not only making 2D images from 3D but being able to directly do a full layout in the exact same program?! 2D images in a 3D space?! That prints to
Assignment 1
Petting a Rhino In which we are introduced to Rhino and it’s 2D 3D madness Getting us familiar with some of the basic commands in Rhino that we would constantly use. With thsese, we were tasked with creaing some primitive shapes and making a multi-view drawing of it, sections, elevation and plan, using Rhinos 2D funtionality. Originally I had created some other models for this project but like a numpty I lost the file, so I made this real quick. In the future, yeah, I would have another copy of the file, like I do with all my other work. Oh well... Otherwise this project was real straight forward and a good intro to the possibilities to be found in Rhino.
Assignment 2
21st Century Origami In which we are tasked with creating a 3D model capable of being folded out of real paper This is where things started getting interesting. Our goal was to take two planar planes and use split and mirror to old the planes around in order to create an intersting model. Similar to folding origami, though with much less skilla nd specific outocome in mind, the trick was to keep everytihing planar. Here we were introduced to trim and split though mostly I used the split function to break the model into pieces. There was no real specific shape we needed to achieve in the end, just to have some interesting shape along with standard multi-view drawing. This was when we also learned how to hatch parts of a dawing in Rhino, allowing 2D shaded drawings of our model to made.
Assignment 3
Boolean’d Trimmings In which create a complex 3D model using the boolean function capable of being folded out of real paper Starting with a block we used the trim and split functions, along with the boolean command, to sculpt out an intereseting, complex 3D shape. The challenge again was to ensure all faces of the object remained planar. This was important because we were to use the unwrap command which would “unwrap” our models and lay them out flat on a 2D plane that could then be printed and folded into a tangible object. As the steps below show, there were a number of cuts that went into making the one shape. Curves were out of the question as once they were unwrapped the actual dimensions of the shape would be lost and incapable to being folded correctly. I took this as a bit of a challenge and created a half circle using a few rotated planes, coming back a bit to low-poly modeling techniques. It worked perfectly on the final model! Super stoked. This was just a fun little project to do with a cool little model I can keep on the dash of my car.
Assignment 4
Convoluted Curvature In which we created a curvy plane between two other curvy planes that touches the two other curvy planes on 3 or more points.... Does that sound confusing? Good because it was. The technical explanation of this project is complicated. The simple explanatioon is just confusing. Though we did learn a lot of interesting commands... We first were given two curvy surfaces, as you see. Next, we created a bounding box around these surfaces, establishing the boundries of our own created curvy surface. Then, we drew curves around the border, between the two curvy surfaces but NOT touching the other two curvy surfaces. From there we defined the “U” and “V” lines of the two curvy surfaces. These lines established a grid on both surfaces that we could use to not only create our surface but to ensure that the surface created touched one of the two other curvy surfaces at, and only at, specific points along the UV lines we decided on. From there, we built our surface, line by line. I believe I ended with 14 intersecting points.
Assignment 4
Convoluted Curvature Along with the understanding of making tangent perfect curves, the contour function does some really nice work. Again, this was another greate example of the Make2D function. Doing a 2D rendering of this surface would be a ridiculous underrtraking, nevermind representing the contours of every curve accurately. Rhino makes that possible, even allowing contour lines to be drawn on a surface from any defined direction, even if you would never use it. This was where we made our first axon view of a project, something I will try to implement whenever I can. I really love the look of it, like a forzen in time explosion of something static. Clipping planes came into play here as well, which we used to create the sections of the curvy planes.
Assignment 5
Trouble with Pronunciation In which we are tasked with designing a mashrabiya using any and all techniques discussed over the semester
mashrabiya:
noun -timber lattice-work (often intricate, geometrical, and beautiful) in Islamic architecture I find it to be a bit difficult to write about this project. The beginning of this one was a struggle, finding me going through a lot of different iterations. I knew from the start that I wanted to have some sort of layering effect within the whole, using the criss-crossing lines. I also knew that I had to anchor their origin point in such a way that they could be rotated around and create a more intricate pattern. Somehow this project started using very similar geometries to a project I had made before which was completely unintentional but for some reason my mind just wanted to do it like this. I tried to fight it, use lots of other ideas, but in the end, with no time left, I conceded and just went with it.