Fields is a native group of components available since the very early version of Grasshopper. In today’s Design Computing class, we studied it again with the first-year design students. I studied these interesting and beautiful shapes earlier here, here, here, and here. The one you see below is a short in-class exercise about vector fields. The exercise aims to show the Grasshopper’s capabilities in form-finding studies via Field Lines. The […]

This is the continuation of the Vector class we started here, and further advanced here, here, and here. This new Rhino Python implementation is mostly educational and partially a hobby. Before this session, we have developed display, magnitude, add, multiply, reverse, and subtract methods. This time, I am adding the vector normalization and dot product methods and seeing the utilizations of the dot product. Line Explanation 1-26 Already explained in […]

This is the continuation of my new project of re-creating the parametric curve and surface methods of Rhino via Python scripting. If you remember, I started with the building block of vector operations, here and here. Then, I defined vector addition and multiplication, before going deeper into the geometric calculations. In fact, they are using the previously defined addition and multiplication methods. New Vector Operations: Subtraction and Reversing In the […]

Let’s continue from the Vector class that started yesterday. Previously, I defined this class to store three numbers (coordinates), named as “components”. I defined a method named __init__ for this. Similarly, I am adding a display method to the Vector class today. Note that I am using Rhino 6 in this code, but it should also work in Rhino 5 or 7. The code Below is the line-by-line explanation of […]

In this new series, I will be using Rhino Python to create some of the fundamental mathematical objects in Rhino. We will learn how to code in Python, and also try to get deeper into the intuition behind some of the fundamental concepts we use every day in Rhino and Grasshopper. The Vector class in Rhino Python is the starting point of this journey. Just like vectors, most of the […]

Utilizing “Force Field” components of Grasshopper to show my students how it is easy to develop flexible surfaces in design. The classical parametric canopy design is introduced in this video: According to Wikipedia; In vector calculus, a vector field is an assignment of a vector to each point in a subset of space.[1] A vector field in the plane, for instance, can be visualized as a collection of arrows with […]

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 […]

I’ve seen beautiful examples of similar compositions made using vector field components in Grasshopper. I just tried to make my own animate field lines to see how they float over force dynamics. In essence, these compositions could also be done using regular vector components but the field components make life much easier by merging different forces together rather quickly. Here is my Grasshopper definition (be careful it may slow the […]

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 […]

Using SPM Vector Components developed by two talented people, Daniel Hambleton and Chris Walsh (website here), I’ve studied ways of displaying dynamic diagrams of form. I’ve modified an example file and found myself in a surprising formal exploration. It’s like watching the clouds, giving them meaning like a sheep, a flower, a baby… Here is a link to the Grasshopper file. Right-click and save it to your computer (don’t left-click it) [GHX: 0.8.0066: SPM […]

Inspired by Andru Pavlov’s design, I used a curve to accomplish grid tearing. It’s straightforward, and from an educational perspective, this exercise includes several potentials on vector arithmetics and graph manipulation techniques. As a design domain, this definition stresses the use of associative entities in a parametric model. Any primitive or complex entity may evoke different parameters in others. You may download the Grasshopper definition here:[2012_01_06_tear]