I’ve worked a little more about the Solar Position definition I’ve started here. The definition uses Danel da Rocha’s beautiful solar position script and utilizes it with other components. It creates visual output for any given surface, divided into quads (with side faces of course) and coloring according to their orientation to the sun. This time (file here: [GHX: 0.8.0066]) I added an occlusion part to calculate the surface’s own shadow. Now, […]

I recently discovered Wordle, a visualization tool for websites. I’m very curious about the social network of design computing community. Trying to understand the trends, how the knowledge is spreading, and the role of different actors on this developing field of architectural design. First of all, I analyzed designcoding.net with all words within 103 posts until today (Click on the image for full size). Wordle can be visited by clicking here. […]

Here are several passages from Shamos’s dissertation thesis, where he is studying the history of geometry from the perspective of a computer scientist. This topic always fascinated me. However, this is a good reading for the algorithmic roots of geometry. “…Egyptian and Greek geometry were masterpieces of applied mathematics. It is well established that the original motivation for tackling geometric problems was the need to tax lands accurately and fairly […]

Here I am testing the nesting. RhinoNest is a plug-in for Rhino and a set of components for Grasshopper. I tested it using my old interlocking fabrication definition (here) and (here). I downloaded RhinoNest from this website and installed it. However, I sounded a little complicated at first sight. Then I found a sample definition (here) and modified it a little bit to meet my purposes. First of all, I added orientation components […]

I have come across several high school topics I was afraid of. While I was searching for a geodesic dome definition in Grasshopper, it was quite surprising that I found an easier way of modeling an approximation of icosahedron, the famous platonic solid. Icosahedron was a research topic of this website at various posts before (here, here, and here). In order to generate geodesic spheres, first I had to solve […]

Yesterday, Kağan asked me about the isovist component in Grasshopper and how it works. In fact, it is a long story, I said because once upon a time, I was curious about Space Syntax theory as my old friend Ela Çil introduced it. So, here is an original definition of Michael Benedikt; “The environment is defined as a collection of visible actual surfaces in space. An isovist is the set […]

Creating and handling new types of grid configurations might be an important topic, as Grasshopper is not supporting them natively (yet). I tried to create some semi-regular tessellations based on regular grids. It is actually truncated versions of regular grids, but it slowly becomes interesting as I realized that I may further truncate emerging grids to create Level 2 and Level 3 grids with more complex tessellations. Here are two […]

Not all of them, but when you get the idea, you’ll see there are lots of different alternatives for creating Fuller’s famous Geodesic Domes (Although in fact, he is not the inventor of it). I was playing with Platonic Solids in Rhino and realized that the “Pull” command is very useful in subdividing objects. I modeled this in Rhino 4. First, take a regular Icosahedron and divide it. Because, this […]

Playing with the 2D Metaball component in Grasshopper. I was curious about why there are no Metaballs in 3D in Grasshopper. Then, I realized that in fact, the 2D Metaball component is creating a section of a 3D Metaball computation. I think it is a topic worth studying even 10 years after this original post to develop an easy way to create the metaball surfaces. In 2012, thanks to the […]

Basic Design Studio at Bilgi University is coming to semester’s big final. Nowadays, students are trying to build their final projects. Oğuz and Gupse’s group has a truss structure with nearly 800 segments. They attempt to build it by taking length values from their own Rhino model by hand. And this itself had brought a difficulty, because one person of the group should be assigned only to do this measurement, […]

After the starting point of the Galapagos, there came another attempt to utilize this beautiful addition of David Rutten. This time, I worked over the night to tell it what I want. The aim was (or seemed to be) simple at first sight. I wanted several shapes (not one) to fit into an area, as smallest as possible, without overlaps. This is packing objects. A bounding box and area components quickly […]

Galapagos was a great improvement when it became available natively within Grasshopper as an Evolutionary Solver. However, I couldn’t find time to examine it until recently. This examination gave me an idea of algorithmic thinking, tool making, and tool using. The first experiment shown below tries to solve equilateral triangulation, based on the Delaunay method. Galapagos has two different solvers, named “simulated annealing solver” and “evolutionary solver” shown respectively below. […]

The tetrahedron is a popular platonic solid for designers. We’ve explained how to draw them using equilateral triangles here before. Recently I’ve found (sorry, lost the web address) a much quicker way of modeling a Tetrahedron using a cube. It’s very simple, just connecting the three opposite corners of the cube automatically makes them equal, resulting in the four equal faces. Of course this time you’ll have to calculate the […]

…While it is true that every curve which can be described by a continuous motion should ve recognized in geometry, this does not mean that we should use at random the first one that we meet in the construction of a given problem. We should always choose with care the simplest curve that can be used in the solution of a problem, but it should be noted that the simplest […]

Digging out with Grasshopper, Rhinoscript, and Paneling Tools, everything seems to be more and more automated and fast. However my colleagues Mete, Benay and Elif reminded me that, we can always do much with those high-end architectural geometry tools, but we still have to understand and follow the roots, probably best described by the “manual ways”. Sometimes using these methods would be much more intuitive as they are SLOW enough […]

Experimenting with various plug-ins for solar calculations, I found Daniel Da Rocha’s robust implementation of the solar position algorithm in vb.net. It calculates the solar angle of any place and time. Although it’s written in the old vb.net component, it still works great. I’m trying to create a fast and easy workflow to optimize Grasshopper models based on solar directions. This is done by projecting faces to the solar planes […]

Today, there are pedagogical and practical challenges on the use of algorithms in architectural design, as computer puts not only a physical but also a cognitive layer between designer and the subject. Formulation of this cognitive layer is becoming important, regarding which model of computing is used to connect designer with the subject. Is it a “designerly” search, or design exploration in a visual programming environment? As most of the researchers admit […]