Maxscipt can be used to automate specific modeling tasks in a sequential-parametric way. This example, developed in 2005 shows an example of that. It creates various table designs by polygon modeling operations and asks the user various parameters. Maxscript file is here, [MS File] you can download, test and alter it however you want (last tested in Max Design 2011 and works). Below is the interface of the script; There are […]

This elegant and straightforward tiling geometry is credited to Dominican priest Sebastien Truchet in 1704 and was documented in a book titled “Memoir sur les Combinasions” (A Memoir on Combinations). After delving into the renowned Truchet Patterns in 2013, I revisited their three-dimensional tiling counterparts today. This served as a valuable exercise in geometry during my previous Design Geometry course. I believe it enhances one’s proficiency in mastering the technical […]

This presentation was completed in 2007, as a part of a research project titled “Analytical Visuals in Architectural Design Studio”. We decided to use Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye as our actor, trying lots of different visual effects and techniques to understand and express its fundamental design principles. Below are some of the elements we used in the project: some renders and panoramas along with a small video experiment. Modeling was […]

This simple tool, N-Grid resembles John Hejduk and colleagues’ famous design exercise “The Nine-Square Grid”. I developed the tool in 2009 using MaxScript. The nine-square grid is one of the most common kit-of-parts exercises in design studios for over 50 years. To explain briefly, the nine-square grid exercise is based on transforming a nine-square grid into a series of alternatives. The nine-square grid is an open-ended educational application with a limited but flexible context. It […]

It was the 2008, eCAADe Presentation at Antwerp together with Birgül Çolakoğlu and Serkan Uysal. This paper presents a student work developed in the Introduction to Computational Design graduate course titled “Designing the Design” at Yildiz Technical University. The course focuses on the use of algorithms as design tools, rather than coding experiments. The course runs parallel to the shape grammar course. There, we study the basic concepts of computation […]

Throne of my lonely niche, my wealth, my love, my moonlight.My most sincere friend, my confidant, my very existence, my Sultan, my one and only love.The most beautiful among the beautiful …My springtime, my merry-faced love, my daytime, my sweetheart, laughing leaf …My plants, my sweet, my rose, the one only who does not distress me in this room …My Istanbul, my karaman, the earth of my AnatoliaMy Badakhshan, my […]

For the last 10 days, I’ve been searching for a proper algorithm for representing surfaces using planar shapes. It is obvious that triangulation is an answer but there is an interesting research topic of planar remeshing using shapes other than quads, hexagons, or any other regular polygons. Especially in computer graphics, such things refer to the optimization of models to decrease the load of GPUs. In the Grasshopper community, this […]

I finally installed Firefly, it immediately powers Grasshopper up with beautifully smart components, even if you don’t have Arduino it is still very useful. If you want to give it a try, first you have to install a small tool free from www.reactivision.com in order to send data to Firefly. After that, you may download and install firefly from their website, www.fireflyexperiments.com. It was the real-time inputs, my first interest. […]

Is it possible to model a two-way parquet deformation using only native components of Grasshopper? In this definition, I limited myself to 10 of them. Parquet deformations are a very interesting and pedagogical topic to teach some of the basics of contemporary parametric modeling. This post explains a minimal parquet deformations algorithm in Grasshopper. However, this has its own limitations. You will see that the definition generates the attractor graph […]

Previous studies on trigonometric surface equations showed me an interesting alternative. This is the modification of the breaststroke surface definition. This time, I’m trying to fix the equation and change input values in a fashion that the waves of the surface are not symmetrical. Here are a few experiments on it; (Size, 44.8, X=10, Y=5, animating X’s from 0 to 32) (Size: 42, X=7, Y=5, animating X’s from 0 to […]

In Turkish, there is a strange word “baklava” that has many uses. According to Wikipedia: Baklava is a rich, sweet pastry made of layers of filo pastry filled with chopped nuts and sweetened with syrup or honey. It is characteristic of the cuisines of the former Ottoman Empire and those of Central and Southwest Asia. However, we should add that 150 gr. of baklava is 413 calories. Here is it […]

It all started with my new passion for origami tessellations, not much of origami, but the tessellation part. I was too lazy to fold it physically, nor model them using an engine such as Kangaroo. That would also be very unnecessary (and yes, very boring) to simulate a folding effort on the computer unless we lose our connection with the real world. Instead, I tried to look at a much […]

You might recall this type of parametric brickwork from architectural classics, such as the Programmed Wall by ETH Zurich and Gramazio Kohler Research, or the facade of the Mulberry House by SHoP Architects. Initially, I explored the simplest method for placing boxes on a surface, but this approach didn’t yield the correct layout. To improve it, I introduced gaps, which not only liberated the wall’s design but also opened up […]

Here are funny icons from Martin Berube (other icon sets of him here) if you plan to build your components or clusters in Grasshopper. It somehow became a fashion of Rhinoceros, to give names of animals to products, that at first seemed to be only the species in danger of extinction. (maybe I am wrong but it is a fact that %85 of Black Rhinos were killed in the past […]

The famous “Deutsch limit” says, “you cannot have more than -say a hundred- components in a visual programming environment, that is why you cannot write an operating system with it.”; so it says, the perceptual and pedagogical advantages of visual programming are limited according to the size of your screen. However, there are two main oppositions to this argument. One of them says “textual programming environments have the same limitation, […]

Just a quick tip as I thought might be useful in some cases. Generating random numbers in architectural scripting is not a too catchy thing for designers. It is for sure, we want every parameter to be under our control (as if it were possible!). I was thinking about that in Grasshopper. A dataflow graph such as in Grasshopper regenerates whenever necessary (a change on an input value “fires” every […]

After playing with vector fields in 2d (here) it was quite easy to create a 3d surface deformation. Here is my first experiment on a regular triangular grid’s three-dimensional behavior within a vector space, that includes a point charge of varying z coordinates. That makes field lines escape to a bounding box, instead of a bounding rectangle. Again, you may play with force decay, the number of samples, and the […]

Back to the basics. I finally had time to test the vector fields components in Grasshopper. It was a couple of updates ago, a new tool group emerged in the vector tab, introducing different types of vector fields to users. Then, these fields could be merged to form more complex effects. However, I created a very simple example of how we can use those components to distort a system (such […]

In this exercise, Grasshopper draws various Archimedean spirals. It constructs polar points and maps them onto a range of angles and a number of points. The spiral’s turning speed is determined by the constant “a,” while the constant “n” gives unique names to the spirals by raising the angle variable to the power of 1/n. Wolfram Mathworld names the spiral with n = -2 as lituus, n = -1 as […]

Can we go back to the beginnings of algorithmic design tools, when it was still as simple as possible (not to the binary level of course)? Most of the theorists agree about the fact that contemporary parametric design tools sometimes provide needlessly many possibilities that suppress the designer’s own creativity. The Voronoi component in Grasshopper was one of the cult examples of that (mentioned here). Throughout this blog, I always […]