Evaporation Station – Black Rock City

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

AA Make Lab at Hooke Park

http://www.youtube.com/michagrau#p/c/141BFDA6E35DF197/3/qUnumytQH8c

The videos are from the workshop I attended in April. This particular video shows Michael Grau’s robot, which basically draws the intersection points along a wooden member as slashes in the right or left direction and writes a code consisting of a number and a letter, so later on when it came down to putting the structure together we knew exactly where and what direction to put the wooden members in. Time was running out so we used cable ties for both constructions. The final structure is a very organic form.

The  second construction was created by studying people and their movements on the site at Hooke park, the movements were  3d scanned using a hacked Kinect Xbox (acted as a motion sensor), then points were generated in Rhino to form a point cloud model. The points were joined together with lines forming a voronoi (a volume,form). We then used a robot which took the coordinates of each member from the computer and translated these to the space in the forest, it moved within the perimeter of the site and told us where to position each wooden member, so we cut the wood as we went along and connected each member with  an eyehook and a cable tie. Sometimes additional support was required that the computer did not account for, so we just added these. Also in the organic form the material used was not flexible enough to create the rounded shapes, as a result the structure kept breaking in sections and we had to add additional supports.

If we had more time it would have been ideal to test different types of material.