Daniel Piker’s Lecture at Strelka Institute

Below is a great lecture by Daniel Piker, the developer of Kangaroo, at the Strelka Institute in Moscow. He shows how the plugin works, how playful it is and what can be done with it:

Building Fashion.

Design in all disciplines is becoming more and more centered around digital tools. Previously very specific manual skills were prioritised, however increasingly digital tools are being learnt, skills that can be applied across disciplines, such as Architecture, Fashion and Industrial design.

With this in mind and having always had a interest for the body, textiles, and dealing in 1:1 scale, I recently joined the a AA Paris visiting school, ‘BUILDING FASHION’, which, used various Architectural techniques and 3D Modelling software to develop garments.

We began by material testing, both physically and digitally, taking the opportunity to utilise and develop my Grasshopper and Kangaroo skills on the surface of the body. I looked at the idea of tenacity and opacity and translating it into a simple material system. I developed a simple strip system, which when manipulated increased the complexity of the elements, creating interesting geometric shapes and performative functions.

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

Social Forces, Literally !

Nathan Miller, creator of Slingshot has used Kangaroo and his own plugin on Grasshopper to import his Facebook friends as a  network of lines and applied different physical forces between them depending on the level of connectivity between friends.

Interesting way to start designing a building?

Video Below:

More Information on Nathan’s blog The Proving Ground.