LIVE COMPONENTS BLOG

The LIVE COMPONENTS blog is a fantastic resource for parametric designers for both inspiration and technical knowledge. It is run by Hyoung-gul Kook, a specialist in Advanced Architectural Geometry from Columbia University and an architect at Weiss/Manfredi in New York. The blog details a wide range of projects which are mostly based in Grasshopper, and provides detailed tutorials of how their definitions work. This forces you to build the definitions yourself and understand more fully the process being followed, as opposed to downloading a ready made Grasshopper file. Projects range from complete systems such as La Fabrique Sonore to individual components.

Membrane Bunching

Here is an animation of membrane bunching I have been working on with help from Arthur. The membrane is suspended from 4 outer hanging points and 1 central. Triangulating springs are added to the mesh to force it to retain its shape and bunch like a real fabric. In order to achieve the complex folding that occurs in fabrics, the vertical unary force is not applied universally to all points, but is rather applied to only the paths within the fabric along which the majority of the load passes. This was calculated through earlier research. When the fabric first drops at the beginning of the video these force paths are visible.

Mesh Relaxation – Kangaroo Tutorial

Daniel piker has posted three tutorials on how to relax mesh using Grasshopper and Kangaroo to simulate tensile structures. Follow them on Vimeo:

Tutorial 1 – Relax an example Mesh

Tutorial 2 – Relax your own mesh

Tutorial 3 - Adding ridge and boundary cables

Bending Curves on Kangaroo

As part of an investigation into gridshells I posted in the Grasshopper forum to try and find a solution to a definition using the bend force component through the Kangaroo plug-in for Grasshopper.

My intention was to deform a grid into lathes using a bend force whilst maintaining the overall length of each lathe (or curve) as a representation of how gridshell are constructed on site, where they are raised or lowered into position from an originally flat grid, and deform or bend due to their own self weight.

Daniel Piker the creator of Kangaroo replied with a very useful script component that allows the user to easily find the correct inputs for a divided curve that is plugged into the bend component.

He also very kindly finished the definition for me.

The files including the C# script component can be found in the forum post here if you would also like to investigate the bend force.

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/forum/topics/kangaroo-bending-1 

Above: Video Capture showing the curves bending in Rhino with Kangaroo