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.

Next step would be to automatize the class to update the triangulation in real-time, and to create user interfaces to make the whole process a bit more friendly. The ultimate goal would be to make it into a plugin for Maya,which I am far away from accomplishing. I guess I won’t develop it much further, but for anyone interested, here is the Python script to download.

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.

I feel the same with GH: to really dive deep in it and do interesting stuff, you cannot escape from scripting, either in VB.net inside GH, or by complementing GH definitions with Rhinoscripts run in parallel. Coming from a scripting background (namely Python/Mel in Maya), I see this as a natural and good thing to happen. No nice and easy to use interface will provide deep and complex results.

I do recognize the importance of GH for those starting to think design in a parametric way. It is straight-forward and easy to use, and a great tool to introduce scripting and programming concepts for the novice, and to perform quick and dirty tasks on the fly. And it only makes you hungry for more, which will eventually lead to interesting future developments. I am just afraid that the lack of real understanding about what is happening in the background of all those nice interconnected components will end up producing superficial, eye-candy results, instead of critical parametric architecture.