It is Baldequin (or Baldachin) in English, Baldeken, or Baldöken in Turkish. I don’t know which one is correct, but it is the name of a structural system of arches and pendentives that carry a dome. Sinan experimented with square, hexagonal, and octagonal variations in his mosque designs (as I developed parametric definitions of them in my 2003 master thesis (here)). Today, together with students we’ve modeled the system and […]

I’ve been searching for a way to implement edge bundling on Grasshopper. It is an effective visualization technique that you can use in connectivity diagrams. There are a couple of different approaches to this problem. It is a nice way to analyze common paths within crowded graphs. I’ve found several entries in the Grasshopper blog about this subject, but only implementing Kangaroo seemed to be a complete solution. My approach […]

Anemone is a simple but effective plug-in for Grasshopper that enables loops. It has been a while since Hoopsnake succeeded in extending the dataflow capacities of Grasshopper with recursion. However, Anemone is much more user-friendly and easy to use. Below is my first test, yes it works! Here is the group page on Grasshopper. I hope this plug-in would be advanced more. I’ll try to return to my old studies […]

Here is a test of the optical flow component of Firefly. You can check the Firefly add-on to Grasshopper here. As an ongoing research project, I’ve been searching for a suitable platform to study responsive geometric patterns. This initial study focuses on one particular effect of Firefly, the optical flow that outputs the direction vectors on a given webcam input. I developed traces of it by joining endpoints of these […]

Currently, Rhinoceros does not offer the capability for an aligned text onto a curve, to the best of my knowledge. However, Grasshopper, with its latest version, provides a solution for such tasks by offering a range of text components. For my current project, I am studying an installation. It incorporates various typographic effects, and Grasshopper has become an invaluable tool in this regard. Nevertheless, it is important to note that […]

Lokma is the name of a pastry made of fried dough soaked in sugar syrup or honey and cinnamon, typically shaped into a ring or ball. Unfortunately, it is not the “Lokma” we’ll study here. In Turkish, there is another meaning of the same word related to the history of Eastern architecture. It is the name of metal connectors in railings, mostly inside of the openings of garden walls and […]

In this fun experiment, points rock and roll! It should be based on a sound input of course but this is only a test to see if I can handle a timer and graph input at the same time. I’ll modify this definition to actuate with sound.  The use of the timer component gives a certain degree of randomness to the overall formation. Here is a video of the Headbanging Points […]

Bending is an easy operation in Rhino and Rhinoscript, however, Grasshopper did not include that particular transformation (along with cage editing) yet. I tried to simulate the bending transformation by using native Grasshopper components. First, surface projections and pulls did not work at all, because I wanted to simulate a real bending effect without changing the surface area or edge lengths. Then, the Surface Morph component seemed to handle this […]

In today’s drawing class, we taught methods of drawing basic transformations by hand. Mirror was one interesting subject of that. However, then I opened Grasshopper and Rhino to test the effects of curved mirror planes. Unfortunately, I realized that there is already a curved mirror component in Grasshopper :( Here is the Grasshopper definition: [GHX: 0.9.0061] This might be one of the simplest ways of introducing generative deformations for design […]

I’ve come across this nice website about the short history of tilings and tessellations. In this post, I am regenerating a tiling of Dürer rhombii. Albrecht Dürer sounds like one of the pioneers of some of the concepts of today’s emerging field of architectural geometry. Here is a phrase from that website about Dürer; “…Like Kepler, regular polygons and polyhedra fascinated Dürer… A large section of the Painter’s Manual is dedicated to […]

While looking at the student works of my 2009 class, I realized that in some cases, the “pipe” component takes a considerable amount of time to execute even on fast computers. Students mostly create pipes to model structural frame systems such as canopies and facade frames. Therefore, the path of the pipe is usually linear (not curved). I decided to calculate the performances of three approaches that could be used […]

Force fields might be one of the most influential component sets of Grasshopper. Thus it also becomes a de-facto standard design approach like the Voronoi subdivision. There are beautiful examples of this mathematical solution. Here is a good explanation of mathematics underneath, and here are my previous studies. I tried to use the Grasshopper’s force field components and see how it looks like when animated. Thus, multiple spin forces are merged […]

Here is a simple description of Rhinoceros’ Printing dialog. It is the same with version 4.0, nothing changed in layout and printing dialogs in 5.0. Significantly our Architectural Geometry classes should benefit from this explanation. Most of these options should be tested with a plotter (e.g. pencil widths) before final print-outs. Also, you may try creating a PDF file of your homework from this dialog.

While searching for a way to work with random points and growing populations, this idea appeared accidentally. I wasn’t trying to mimic the behavior of Karyokinesis of biological cells (in fact I’m in serious doubt about biomimicry in general). The trick is to use a timer + data recorder + a knob for the arbitrary user input. It starts to breed when you start the timer, but to change the […]

I learned this method from the open math resources website. I couldn’t help myself repeat it in Rhinoceros. It was quite fun to solve circle tangency problems in 2D, this is one of them: drawing the circle that passes three given points, not using ready-made commands but only geometric tools of the circle (compass) and ruler (line). Here is the sequence of it: First of all, we need to know […]

Grasshopper still surprises me. This definition draws a spiral by using a random component. It is obvious that the seed value of the random component has a relationship with an archimedean or a similar spiral. My intention was to create a definition to put a number of random points inside a circular area, not a rectangular one. While I grow the radius of a circle and get a t parameter […]

I at the Center is a multiple-axes vertex deformation based on a quadrangular hyperframe, designed by David Oleson at the studio of William Huff in 1964. Below, you see the original drawing and my Grasshopper animation based on a single-point attractor, creating the “I” wherever it is. It was a pleasure to read and repeat this deformation, which is a nice exercise in data tree operations and also one of the […]

This simple vb.net component controls the Rhino viewport background without a need to enter its options panel. It is used to change the viewport background color and grid visibility quickly within Grasshopper. Here is the definition file: [GHX: 0.9.0056]. In order to be able to return to default settings, I put a “default” toggle. Just click on it to “false” state, then the Rhino background color can be changed by the […]

Instead of searching for an iterated and rule-based variety, this method captures instances of spatial deformation by transforming the hyperframe. This liberates us from a classical understanding of pattern deformations that are enframed within regular polygons, mostly rectangles or hexagons. Grasshopper has a built-in component to study such variety. The spatial Deform component gets vectors as inputs and transforms any given geometric object according to it. This website has also […]

Again, I continue with some simple solutions for Grasshopper. The surface split component gives all possible surfaces sliced with given curves. And it creates “invalid” curves with at least one open edge. I used this to perceive the closed regions within a given complex curve set. Just put the “Clean” component to erase the outer invalid surfaces and there remain the closed ones. However this time the question was where […]