Archives for posts with tag: grasshopper

Solar position in grasshopper

September 14, 09 //
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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.

solarposition Definition: solarPos.ghx

grasshopper: the new flash?

July 3, 09 //
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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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parametric workshop / htwk leipzig

July 3, 09 //
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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

Grasshopper definition: complete mess

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