Rhino Tutorial 003

The third tutorial deals with the construction of curves and surfaces through many of the various creation tools.

Here is a link to the 45 minute tutorial video.

Rhino Tutorial 002

The second Rhino Intro. Brief explanation of layer, properties, join, group, and construction planes.

Here is a link to the tutorial video.

Rhino Tutorial 001

As a means to try and capture some of the work that I tend to do every year, a series of software tutorials will be added to the site. This tutorial is the first in the rhino series and explains issues of interface, simple operations, and navigation.

Here is a link to the tutorial.

Digital Project Honeycombs

The post for today is an excert from a project that used digital project to build responsive honeycomb structures. The main goal was to work with rules (rule firing in digital project). In this case, as the cells are stretched, the average cell size is computed. The light gray shows the geometric constraints for the cells.

Then as the individual cell is made larger or smaller than the average size, it is made deep/shallow or thick/think. This variation is visible in the iterations below. This level of analysis adds a level of removal from the designer. One cannot be sure where the depth will shift.

Variations are rendered to give some sense of the range of variation possible. I will be gearing up for class in the fall and will post tutorials on document templates and rule firing, check back.

Point Distance Surface

Building on a couple of the Grasshopper tutorials and trying to include a couple of new commands I developed a surface that responds to a location of a point. The video shows the interactions of the various sliders.

For a bigger video click here .

Making a few tweeks with the sliders and then baking each, the variations from a screen shot below. Unfortunately I could not find a way to trim in grasshopper so this task is completed once the geometry is baked.

When selecting the point, make sure "point" is selected in Rhino. If "coordinate" is selected you can make a point, but you will not be able to move it around.

Revised file based on some feedback from Gabe. My trim is a bit messy because I could not get it to subtract the correct side. I exploded the surfaces to get the final trim. Here is a link to the grasshopper file.

Grasshopper Surface Studies

As a way to explore the potential of Rhino Grasshopper, I started working on a series of milled panels. Each panel varies through the use of a few simple variables (grasshopper uses slider bars). These values are fed to a random number generator so the behavior is somewhat unpredictable.

The loft surface is built through a series of sin and cos curves, where the frequency is controlled by the variables (detail of the relationships below).Here are 4 sample surfaces made through slight modifications of the slider bars.

The surface is then contoured to approximate a milled pattern.

As a variation of the simple surface, it gets slightly submerged into the stocck material, leaving a flat surface on the top with the remaining surface being milled. This reduces the material thickness and milling time.

Polar Array Framework

Inspired by a series of dome structures by Nervi, this project explores the use of a polar array for a framework. The model uses a few simple parameters to control aperature size and depth.

The crossing points of the framework are used as the input points for the cell. A central point is used to control the polar array and distort the framework.

Sheet Metal Screen Wall

As a means to get things started, I am posting an early parametric project that was designed for a gallery installation. Using unrolled surfaces, I developed a wall in which each part would be specific to its location in the assembly. Two surfaces could work to brace one another, giving the system an accumulated rigidity.

The parts spread as they move horizontally and thin as they move vertically.

Another key aspect of this research is in the investigation of material efficient form that can be completely nested on a flat sheet. While this project is not zero waste, one can see the potential of cutting such forms from a flat sheet.