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Showing posts from August, 2016

Rhino & Grasshopper Plugins for Building Computation & Optimizations

Grashopper has a wide set of plugins which can increase the wide range of applicability of grashopper  While Grasshopper itself is a plugin for rhino, there are many individual plugins for each of these separately to increase the productivity of their usage. With the increasing usage of computation in building design, it is also important to know that there are plugins which can give us the best possible solutions for a given set of parameters provided by us.Plugins like Ladybug , Honey-bee , Geco , Galapagos (pre-installed in grasshopper) , for Grasshopper & Diva for Rhino etc.., can help us in creating an environmentally-conscious architectural design. Here is a few list of plugins along with video links that I found would be helpful in understanding the usage of these plugins: Galapagos in Grasshopper (Pre-installed) :       In a brief Galapagos is an Evolutionary Problem Solver in grasshopper that tests all the values and gives us the best possible value (in the num

Autocad Object Grouping: Group Manager

I recently saw that you can add names to your  Object groups in AutoCAD. Although, If you select the objects first and then group them, AutoCAD automatically gives them a name (numbered format) which will be categorized under unnamed groups. How to name a group: Select the group command from the Groups panel in the Home tab (or you can type group and enter)  > then type " n " and enter to type the name of group and enter . P.S: the name of the group can only be one word Advantages of using Group Manager: I don't yet have my full hands on the group manager, but here are the few advantages of group manager which I think will be useful. The group manager lets you change the group parameters (like rename, explode, add description)   You can also Re-Order the objects in the group in the way you want to order (though I'm not sure what's the use of ordering the group). If you don't know the name of the group, there's also a find name b

Grasshopper: divide a surface into grid and extract the curve boundary of each divided plane

The following tutorial helps you to divide a Plane surface  with a UV grid and extract the boundary of each child(divided) planes separately. Steps: The desired surface is either created in grasshopper or one of the rhino surfaces is set to a node in grasshopper. The divide node virtually divides the surface into desired parts & the Isotrim(Subsrf) node creates the divisions on the surface. Then all the created divided surfaces are collected into one node called surface(srf) Now its gets complicated, -All the collected surfaces are listed into a List node (list item), where the list is grafted within then list node before being processed in the node This list is now exploded for the edges using Explode node After the explode node has run, the segments within the node should be grafted . Then this grafted explode node is to be connected to a Graft node, where the list should be flattened before it runs through graft node. (not sure why grafting it within the explo

Grashopper: Divide Surface into grid

This is not so complex/hard take up a single post, but often I tend to forget how to divide a surface into UV grid. It's just a simple 4 steps Set the  Surface  (rhino or grasshopper generated) into the surface node Get the  Divide (Divide Domain 2 )  node to divide the surface(the division wont be visible just yet) Add  Number Sliders  to the U & V nodes of the divide node to adjust the number of divisions according to the requirement Link the surface to the  Subsrf (Isotrim)  node and provide the domain of isotrim node as the result of the divide node You can adjust the number of U & V  divisions using the number slider provided.

Grasshopper: Voronoi Holes on a Planar surface

One of the best natural examples for a Voronoi is the Wing structure of a dragon fly.Grasshopper can help us to build a shape like this in Rhino. Image Courtesy:  The Pond blog Grasshopper by default has a node for Voronoi, we just have to prepare the necessary information to feed into the node. The following example shows how to create a Voronoi shaped holes in a surface Create a planar  Surface  from rhino or grasshopper Randomly Populate the surface with points using the  Populate 2D  Node Feed the surface and the points into the  Voronoi  node and feed a number slider too to adjust eh radius This forms the required Voronoi structure which you can edit the number of points or radius. To create the holes we need to offset each and every inner portion towards its centre using the  Scale  node We can find the centre of each of the inner portions using Area node I'm not sure why but using the offset command surely gives the desired result but in later steps,

Grasshopper: offsetting curves on surface vs scaling curves on surface

Though in Grasshopper Offset and Scale are two different node functions, when it comes to a planar surface, the results of the both are similar. But, I found the " Scale" node to be effective when you want to loft the resultant curve with another. The following images show the different results of a Voronoi structure that yielded when scale and offset nodes are used. When the Offset node is used When Scale is used