I like to deal with possible small computational geometry problems. These fun games are taking 2-3 hours. In addition, these are also memorable exercises. I was reviewing the Anemone plugin last week. I noticed that the Golden Ratio in Grasshopper was not geometrically generated before. Some of the greatest mathematical minds of all ages, from Pythagoras and Euclid in ancient Greece, through the medieval Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa and the Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler, to present-day scientific […]

Anemone components are still working great, extending the abilities of Grasshopper. Here, I studied a space-filling (or plane-filling) fractal called the Gosper-Peano Curve. You should be very careful about the number of iterations (the N input). Because it can crash your Rhino if you change it to more significant numbers. Also, you should have Anemone components installed in order to run this definition. The generator curve is a special one. […]

This is a classical method of generating tree-like forms utilizing a simple command “Arc SED”. The idea is simple, as the command draws arcs using an input direction vector, so this could easily be implemented creating a “smooth” composition of curves just by iteration. Actually, this has been a previous study, discussed before here, using Hoopsnake. Now, this time I’m implementing the same algorithm using Anemone and a couple of other […]

Based on this post, the problem of modeling tree-like fractal shapes is still a good question for the early years of computational design education. Last time, I used Rhino’s macro to study these fractal trees in an “impossibly” limited interface. But this time I used a VB.net script. Here is the code inside of the VB.net component: Here are the inputs. x is the number of iterations. The Crv input is […]

Further studying iteration in Grasshopper, this time, inspired by George Stiny’s “Chinese Ice-Ray Lattice” subdivisions with Aneome, instead of the Hoopsnake add-on I tried in the previous work. As you know, loops add various ways of usage to Grasshopper. In future versions, loops may cease to be just an add-on and become native components of Grasshopper. Until then, loop plugins like Anemone take on this task. In the example here, […]

This is the Grasshopper definition that generates a tetrahedral helix (also called as Boerdijk-Coxeter helix) but in a funny way. This geometry is also a solution for tangent spheres. I generated the helix using Anemone components for recursion and gave it a little bit of responsiveness. I don’t know if it depends on the speed of your CPU but if it is slow enough, you’ll see the snake game of tetrahedral […]

While testing Anemone components for Grasshopper, I accidentally generated these branches by looping. In fact, I was trying to develop the definition that mimics the well-known “Arch SED” component method. This method uses the tangent vectors for the endpoints of the arcs. Then, it iterates the process in a random fashion so that the branches (arcs) join nicely. Anyway, this definition develops new branches from a previous one. It does […]

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 […]

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 […]

The design of Chinese window lattices named “ice-ray” is one of the classic studies of Shape Grammars. It is an old and good example of algorithmic design. George Stiny explained their geometric construction based on the parametric Shape Grammars approach. He explained shape rules and the abstract machine that produces the subdivisions. I was especially interested in Shape Grammars when I was a graduate student. I even made a prototype […]

In order to start creating recursive algorithms in Grasshopper, I finally managed to run Hoopsnake, a special component developed by Yiannis Chatzikonstantinou. This will help me develop parametric models that include loops. The fundamental experiment here shows a surface subdivision based on iterations. We should define a starting object or data, an operation to be repeated, and a limit that will tell Hoopsnake to stop looping. In this condition, this […]