After some intensive months of solving lots of personal issues, I will try now to come back to production here in the blog.
Today I started to work again a bit into Grasshopper, with the initial intent of grasping a bit of the VB.net language. The first task I set up to do was to convert an old Python script to calculate sun position information on a defined location and time. It was initially presented to me by Tobias Schwinn, which in turn based it on an original version from Carlos Lara. The math behind the sun position calculations was taken from this website.
It still does not do much. I will further work on another definition to create a sun diagram in Grasshopper, and later one to work out incident angles on objects. Please, keep in mind these are personal exercises, without much defined goal, and not entirely well written. But it might be useful for some people, so here it is.
Definition: solarPos.ghx
Just started and had already to make a small break due to travelling and family issues! Back in August…
As a part of the course I teach at Bauhaus-Dessau Institute of Architecture, I developed a Delaunay class in Python for Maya to generate the triangulation via mathematical operations (I was also, in the course, using Qhull), based on the algorithm developed by Paul Bourke. It is still very crude and needs lots of works, but it does generate fast and correct triangulations in its current version.
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From 30.05 to 04.06 I gave a quick workshop about Generative Scripting at the Faculty of Architecture in Skopje, Macedonia. There were around 25 students, and I gave them the basics of the basics concerning scripting in Maya, using Python and MEL. As a task, they had to propose something simple for the Airport Tempelhof, in which they could apply given tools, and self-made scripts dealing with parametric design or urbanism. As a beginner’s workshop, the results are more about testing and experimenting with new tools, than serious architectural propositions.
One thing I have been noticing after teaching Python+Maya for the last 2 years, is that maybe this is not the right tool for beginners. Contrary to tools such as Processing, or Grasshopper, scripting with Python in Maya has a very long and steep learning curve. You can produce amazing things, but only after a certain amount of time and investment, which in a 4-day workshop is a bit hard. I was pleased, though, with the final results, and I guess the students were quite excited about all the possibilities these new tools bring to your design practice.
Group Eight (Taseva Tanja, Efremovski Martin, Stilinovic Mladen)
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I recently started to mess around with Grasshopper, the famous plugin for Rhino which kinda revolutionized the way we deal with parametric design. Revolutionized, in my opinion, mainly because of its ease of use, as in a matter of minutes you can see something “amazing” coming on the screen. But I still think GH still has a long way to go before it reaches maturity.
When seeing the current GH production on the web, I am constantly reminded of the times when Flash was introduced and started to become very popular among web-designers. It was so easy to animate something and put on the web, that it didn’t take long for tons of animated websites to start appearing. But most of them were clearly produced without any critical thinking about them. To produce something really interesting, one had to learn the hard part of Flash, which involved Actionscript.
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From 26th to 29th of June, 2009, I participated in the 1st Parametric Workshop at the HTWK in Leipzig. It united more than 40 people from all over the world to play around with parametric design using Grasshopper and fabrication techniques.
It was my first “deep” experience with Grasshopper, as I had already messed up with the plugin before, but just superficially. This time, we chose the most difficult topic (dealing with movable components), and I dived into it to produce my first full-working definition.
We did a surface composed by small components which open and close in a system, allowing several regulations of openings. Here are some images of the process:
Grasshopper definition: complete mess
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I wanted for long to start a blog, and one of my main barriers was to find a name for it. I was in a workshop last weekend, and after hours breaking our head to parametricize our projects, we started making jokes about how everything was “sooo parametric…”. I then found my title.
so parametric… is yet another blog about research and trials concerning parametric architecture and its implications in our practice as architects. I was inspired by so many blogs you can find in the cloud, and my intent is not to be anything different or revolutionary, but to add my own view and experiments to this fascinating field of research.
Definition: solarPos.ghx
