EXLAB: BEND

I will be helping to run a design-build workshop with exlab this February out of our new studio. BEND (in anticipation of playing with some CNC wire formers) will create a collaborative environment encompassing architecture, art, design and fabrication. The workshop will run for two weeks in February culminating in a full scale built work and exhibition. For details and registration go to http://www.exlab.org/2011/10/2012-summer-workshop-creative-computing-digital-fabrication/

PAS – The Performance

All three of the studios I was involved with this semester are wrapping up. Above is media from the Performative Architecture Studio installation at Melbourne University. The studio was run by Stanislav Roudavski, Roger Alsop and myself and will be exhibited at Pausefest on Saturday the 12th November.

IMPLICIT

IMPLICIT is a second year studio I helped run with Tim Schork at the Monash school or Architecture and Design. Photos above are of a 1 to 1 installation completed as part of the studio by Erica Ching.

Performative Architecture Studio 0.1

The Performative Architecture Studio I am helping teach at Melbourne University with Stanislav Roudavski and Roger Alsop is getting to crunch time. Some of the techniques developed and posted on this blog are being utilised by students to produce a full scale dynamic installation. The photo above (credit: Viet Hoang) demonstrates on of the first runs of a large population agent system interacting with DMX lights and colour tracking through max MSP.

Mesh Colour Components

I remade the script from the previous post as GH clusters in order to facilitate multiple operations on the mesh faces (several extrusions for example). Unfortunately the definition needs to explode all of the mesh faces in order to extrude them separately, which slows it down considerably. Download below.

GH Vertex Colour Extrude

Vertex Paint -> Grasshopper Extrude

Wrote a quick little vb script for extruding mesh faces based on vertex colours. Turns out playing with dirty mesh topologies isn’t very easy in rhino as its favourite pastime is returning invalid mesh errors. I am trying out workflows similar to some nifty videos demonstrated on We Work For Her whereby mesh properties or UV map values are translated to xyz space. You can paint vertex colours in Maya and so it can be a very fast method for creating differentiated panelling or textures on complex geometries. Script as vb component is here

Extrude Based on Vertex Colour

20,000 Agents on Meshes

PAS - Trails on Mesh from gwyll jahn on Vimeo.

Ive been working on a system for constraining agent populations to mesh geometries in order to produce undistorted projections onto inflatable structures. The inflatable is modelled in Maya and imported into processing as a WETriangleMesh (toxiclibs mesh class) in order to make full use of the winged edge/connectivity information of the mesh faces. The mesh is projected to 2d to facilitate very fast edge intersection detection, and agents are rendered in 3d by projecting them back onto the 3d geometry. By storing the associations between agents and their current face on the mesh as a java map, looping through the population of agents or mesh faces can be considerably reduced. This allows for very large populations of agents (around 8000 in 12fps, up to about 30,000 at slower frame rates) and meshes of virtually limitless complexity.

LoveLace

Last weekend was the opening of the Powerhouse Museums international LoveLace exhibition in Sydney. I was fortunate enough to have my work nominated by a tutor (Tim Schork from Mesne) last year, and it picked up the Student Prize.  Tim also won the digital category with his own collaborative effort with Supermanoeuvre. My own work was an extension of research posted elsewhere on this blog – using implicit surfacing techniques to materialise complex growth systems. The final piece was much smaller than intended due to time constraints. We had originally planned to take full advantage of Shapeways largest bed size for SLS Nylon printing, a whopping 700mm x 380mm x 580mm.

Image Based Vector Fields

I put together a very simple script for creating vector fields from images, visualising the results with one of SPM’s vector field components. The script iteratively rotates a vector based on the greyscale difference between neighbouring pixels, and outputs the grid of vectors. Results and definition below.

Vector Field From Image

Unroll, Cells, Mesh Polylines, Reparametrise components

Ive decided to upload a few scripts/user components that extend grasshoppers basic functionality and that I have been using frequently for a few projects. The first is a headnod to Andrew Heumann’s Unfolding definition, but greatly simplified by using two script components to sort brep faces and organise the datatrees for the compound transforms. Having a ‘parametric’ unroll capacity is useful for converting from 3d to 2d space, and allows the image sampler to map (effectively) to 3d geometry. The second user object is an attempt to mimic Geometry Gym’s Cells From Network component by using delaunay meshes, I am yet to figure out how to ‘traverse’ the network to create cells. Essentially the user object creates a delaunay mesh from curve intersection and end points, then loops through the mesh edges and removes any that are not coincident with the original curves. It maintains tree structures so that cells with a removed edge are on the same branch, allowing them to be joined together into a closed cell. I am sure this is a very inefficient way of doing this but it ‘works’ ok. The final two components cluster up some simple meshing of polylines and reparametrisation of data.

 

EDIT – The unroll brep definition now works with multiple breps at once.

Unroll Multi Brep
Create Cells
Mesh Polylines
Reparametrise