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)
Group H_F_H (Lilitkin Sanja, Pejoski Martin, Nikolovski Ivan)
Group H_F_H
Group myGroup (Dojchinoska Dobrica, Strezovska Borka, Arsov Nikolche)
Group Lulala (Nadica Bogoevska, Jasmina Abdul, Petrovski Aleksandar)
Group Lulala
Group Seven (Tonka Anodova, Radica Ugrova, Ivana Stefanovska)
Group Asymptote (Zlatko Lazarovski, Marta Ilievska, Aleksandar Bocevski)
The whole group in the final day
Workshop poster
Hey Daniel, great post! nice to see you had a good and productive time in Skopje. Keep up the good work!
Tobias
Thank you Tobias! Good to see you around here. Yours was one of my inspiring blogs :)
And actually it was you who passed me the “scripting virus”, as Neil says hehehe
“this is not the right tool for beginners” DDR 2008
“It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
Seriously though, python is the sole language i can think of that scales well. it scales both computationally as well as in terms of programming skill. python is as suitable for a 5 line shell script as is it to implement high performance distributed FEM applications. its a language suitable to both novices and experts.”
Ed Dijkstra
So, keep teaching! =)
alec’
you can check out ParaCloud GEM (http://www.paraclouding.com) – it offers a very simple approach for generative mesh modeling…..