DDA\Repository

DDA Repository is an online repository of scripts, definitions, reference material, logic diagrams, primers, tutorials, images and videos that is part of an ongoing research project run by Prof Bharat Dave and myself at the University of Melbourne. In the creators experience of teaching scripting and parametric tools (grasshopper) to architecture students it is difficult for students to pick up and extend upon either the work of previous students or examples/code they have found elsewhere. Consequently the work they produce (and this may extend broadly to a large proportion of parametric models) struggles to resolve complex design or programming problems and consistently falls back on the familiarity of conceptually simple models.

We have been developing DDA Repository over the past year and although it is still in design stage and pretty buggy, we would love to invite teachers and students of digital design to come forward and explore two aspects of the project. We have developed a simple tool to allow students to create logic diagrams of their designs and scripting process, which are then converted to metadata within the main, online grid of content. The website becomes an interlinked network of imagery and tags in an attempt to associate design outcomes with scripts, tutorials and pseudocode. In this way students can explore not only a script that may have facilitated a built outcome, but also similar tutorials, reference projects and concepts.

A couple of studios and workshops have also created subpages in order to share content with a specific focus. If anyone thinks they may be interested in using the site for a workshop or class (or almost anything for that matter), please let us know.

Bend Workshop Manual

The manual for our upcoming workshop is now completed with one day to spare, and now it is online for all to use. The workshop explores CNC Wire Forming through a series of seminars, models and exercises which are included in the manual.

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.