A completed, compiled image demonstrating some of the work I've done in Rhino and Grasshopper.

Top: Example configuration of shade wall, depicting shadows cast when encountering light.

Bottom (left to right): Original solar shade study lofted with thickness, regularized shade wall with uniform plane rotations, contrasted attractor based surface grid (back view).

 First image: A script that I stumbled onto online, which describes a system that forms the foundation of the model I created; in this version, a series of triangles lofted between two curves "dance" as sliders for different parameters are manipulated.

 Second Image: Experimenting with a rather dramatic lofted surface, while attempting to rebuild the model system in grasshopper. This really helped me to understand better what each function does, as I worked through trial and error to replicate some of the properties in the exemplary script.

 Third Image: In this version, I tamed the surface itself to a more simple surface, a simple curve duplicated and lofted upward. This process breaks the surface itself into vertical and horizontal divisions which form a separated grid system of subsurfaces within the lofted surface.

 Fourth Image: The model system is completed for the most part here. At this point, I was experimenting with different aesthetics by playing with the grid parameters and seeing how the attractor point would affect each piece of the broken surface.

Fifth Image: To add a level of reality to the system, I replicated the system, offset it, and lofted to create materials with thickness. Here is what will be rendered for the presentation images.

Grasshopper Model - Video

 

A video that shows the nature of the final model that I've generated using Grasshopper. The premise of the model is what I've called a "shade wall"; essentially it is a divided grid of rectangular panels generated from a lofted surface between two identical curves. The individual grid pieces rotate and reorient in response to an attractor point in the model, which results in a variety of configurations of each individual piece of the grid. 

As a result, generative modeling has provided a system by which an entire "wall" system or skin is controlled at any given time by the distance and location of one point, ultimately dictating the overall look and permeability of the surface itself. Rendered images include shadow to demonstrate this.

 Today I sat down to move forward with my model, incorporating some new principles of using attractor points to suggest physical surfaces that articulate reciprocity, inverse relationships, and spatial patterns.




After several hours, I found myself not too far along in pushing those concepts... I worked through a tutorial on attractor points on a 2D plane, which is the first image you see. Then, in an effort to manipulate this gridded and attractor-based pattern in the vertical dimension, I went through a tutorial that taught me how to coordinate a 3D surface based off a point grid to react to an attractor point.

My next idea was to create a grid of these grids, and compose a pattern that would show a slight variation based on slight changes and translations of each surfaces attractor points, but was unable to independently attach each copy to a new attractor point. This pulls from the concept of matrix that we applied in project 1. I'm struggling to put the 2 and 2 together from the different strategies that I've learned, because neither of the tutorials, nor most that I find in general, do much to explain what the tools really do. I'm a bit frustrated by my inability to work this out, but I'll revisit tomorrow and see if I can make any more progress before placing onto a presentation sheet.

So just playing around in Grasshopper with the existing file that I produced to replicate from the tutorial, I started to tweak a couple of the properties of the model just to see what it would look like.

I started by attaching new curves which would act as the rails replacing what was before, two straight vertical lines. These curves are drawn freely, without any sort of underlying logic or order, for the time being. Furthermore, to start to suggest the pulse motif, I alternated straight vertical lines with a fabricated free form curve, and applied the loft tool in grasshopper to see what the resultant was. The images below show a couple of different conditions, where I am just orbiting around the surface, and then I change a couple of the model parameters such as the number of shade divisions along the curves and lines, and the depth of the shade itself in relation to the line it is attached to. This started to remind me of the discussions we had earlier in the semester about understanding how a model changes when you start to simplify or remove information, and allow it to reach a "cruder" form.

At this point, being perfectly honest, I'm not really sure where to go from here, and I have just been experimenting with the software given the exposure to the provided tutorial. I guess I will be refining the geometries and hopefully applying more complexity to the model so it is more than just a couple of tweaks from the original shade model. I also am not sure how grasshopper defined components are rendered; I don't think Rhino recognized them formally as objects, so I just took screenshots.

Rhino & Grasshopper this time...

So I went through the tutorial provided for the Grasshopper solar shade model, and as you can see, it looks exactly the same as what the tutorial was intended to create (a success for me at this level).

I think at this point, I'm siding with Grasshopper over Generative Components, and I plan on moving forward with a model that suggests some of the relationships of time, space, and surface that I suggested in the previous projects.

I will be using the concept of rhythm and pulse as a starting point; not sure what that will branch out into...

Worked through the tutorial on Generative Components to generate a simple grid of control lines, as instructed from the video. This alone took a considerable amount of effort as I learned my way around the interface; many of the buttons referenced in the video are represented differently or not at all on the workspace I was on. Maybe I clicked out of some things that would have helped.

Anyway, I will be revisiting the Grasshopper tutorial tomorrow and comparing that system of organization to GC.