When I was a student, 3D modeling and rendering on the computer was an advanced skill. I only managed to create my first rendering in the 4th-year project.  Then, it became a special talent for designers, even opening a freelance business. However, that came to an end when that technology expanded, reaching everybody. Ten years ago, different ecological analysis methods on geometric designs were also another specialized field that everybody […]

Today, we’ve finished first phase, the introduction to dataflow management in visual programming environments; and conducted “well defined” part of the mid-term examination. First two questions were designed to test technical skills of data matching, geometric evaluation. First one was a simple algorithm that calculates the area of ANY triangle in real-time. Tricky part of this problem was to research and find ways of calculating area and implementing it in […]

As far as I understood, it is impossible to physically construct double-curved surfaces from quadrilateral and planar faces. This definition tries to find an optimized alternative to this problem. Any surface, single or double curved, is divided into standard sub surfaces. But this time, those surfaces are treated as planar surfaces, therefore one corner is moved to meet this requirement. The output consists of only planar surfaces ready for fabrication. […]

This is another popular “math surface” being rediscovered by designers nowadays, in 2012. Saddle surfaces, seen above as mentioned earlier (here) have a special type named “Monkey Saddle Surface”. This surface was a dramatic example of how Grasshopper can control equations and instantly show graphical results. The mathematical equations start with Z=… this makes it very easy for us to transform any x-y grid centers (a 2d data tree of […]

QuickShaper (QS) an experimental computer utility for Shape Grammars. It aims to assist designers and students in creating and exploring rule-based designs. QS is first presented and published with Birgül Çolakoğlu at the 25th eCAADe Conference held at Frankfurt / Germany in September 29th, 2007. QS is a scripted utility, written in MaxScript, developed within Autodesk’s 3D Studio MAX version 9. It is not tested on earlier versions. QS works […]

I tried different approaches to drawing platonic solids using Grasshopper’s native components. However, it seems impossible now. In geometric definition, a platonic solid is a set of points, distributed on a sphere with equal distances. If the set contains 12 points, then it’s an icosahedron. I found lots of information about these objects and mathematicians seem to love analyzing them. They created different approaches to building an icosahedron. One of […]

[RFA: Revit 2012] It seems simple at first sight, but creating a window definition in Revit requires a lot more time than I expected. A freelance job led me to create this parametric object, when I saw the architect’s sketch of all window types of the building side by side. There was a clear connection between all of them, leading me to define a single window object. Of course I’m […]

Here are some results of fourth homework. An animate design sketch of a roof structure. Yağız, Deniz and Sacha created animated results; Derya and Sacha proposed conventional approaches to create “openings” by animating geometries. However, that does not meet the requirement of structural (and logical) intentions of the design problem. Unless some very high-tech materials were introduced to design. On the other hand, Yağız tried to create a structure that […]

This is another old-school approach to parametric modeling, today known better as part of Building Information Modeling. I tried to create parametric objects in order to understand and learn the capabilities of Revit.  That was very useful for me in learning this interface. I specially chose Le Corbusier’s chair set as my first experiment on family creation in Revit. On his 100th anniversary of Eastern Voyage, Le Corbusier’s soul returned […]

After Puzzling, I tried to establish more of Escher’s basic grid transformations using Grasshopper’s native components. This definition simulates Escher’s transformation of four-cornered grids. The postulate is based on the fact that every quadrilateral (or triangular) planar shape can create regular tessellations without gaps or overlaps. In the traditional method, this tessellation is achieved by rotating the shape 180 degrees and copying afterward. However, in Grasshopper we simply define the […]

After a reviewing a short story of digital architecture from Branko Kolarevic, we looked at the roots of the theory and the concepts derived from it such as digital fabrication, building information modeling and parametric modeling. After a short brief, we’ve discussed about the final projects. Next week, we’ll start studying final projects and start to look at individual problems developed from them. Final submissions will highly be related with […]

Nowadays, I found myself back into traditional hand sketching. Several failed attempts on Grasshopper led me back there. NURBS (and Grasshopper) somehow limits our conception of surfaces to four-cornered (or two-directional) manifolds. Although it sounds like limiting our designs, having four-cornered component spaces has still lots of experimental fields for designers. Escher is a cult person, who transforms the euclidean coordinate system to meet his design intentions. There are lots […]

This topic of trees and recursive computing is inspired by the method shown here at the Rhino Python 101 Primer. This is a beautiful method of recursion that creates tree-like shapes, composed of arcs. I constructed these arcs by using the Arc SED (start, end, direction) method. This requires start and end points and a vector that is tangent to the arc (at the start point). Therefore, the overall look […]

Today, we’ve studied fundamentals of component-based design methods. Using curves and surfaces as starting points, we’ve experienced ways of translating those entities via design criteria based on our purposes. First, a curve is used to construct a leaf structure. We’ve experienced dispatching data lists and combining them back together. Subdividing curves into points created further entities such as vectors and planes. We used those entities as inputs of regular drawing […]

Today, we’ve discussed ways of subdividing entities to create parametric definitions. Curves can be divided into segments, creating snake-like object definitions. This exercise is important regarding the management of data. Vectors and planes are used as reference entities here. Nowadays, it became clear to me that, reference planes are very important because they both include reference points and related vectors as well. The definition studied in this post includes a curve […]

This was an interesting topic in design computing class. Geometric constructions based on strict relationships are becoming exciting in parametric modeling environments. I think muqarnas includes such a relationship. There is a primary method of modeling this shape, introduced by Mete Tüneri. His solution to a simple parametric muqarnas object includes a surface with six reference points, with two boolean differences (one cylinder and one box) creating the component. In […]

Today’s subject was closely related to the one last week; the data list and data tree management. Creating suitable data structures for our purposes is one of the tricky parts of whole Grasshopper experiments. We’ve developed a grid of objects, somehow associated with another one (a curve). Strong emphasis was on the way of thinking, getting back and forth on the process, and the re-definition of data lists. Especially, this […]