After our post on Jake Hebbert‘s tutorial, here are some great Grasshopper tricks to create boids or fractals by Kristof Crolla, Architect at LEAD and teacher at Honk Kong University on his vimeo channel:
Below: Boids behaviour with Hoopsnake
Below: Fractals using Hoopsnake:
Below: Catenary Network on Kangaroo:
Below: Explaining the path mapper:
Below: Organizing hexagons on flat list
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The Grasshopper script simulates a random soap bubble cluster starting from 3 soap bubbles of known radii based on Plateau’s Laws. All surfaces in a bubble cluster are spherical, including films dividing two adjacent bubbles.
A list is used to store valid bubbles generated through a Hoopsnake sequence and a number of custom components calculate correct bubble intersection in line with Plateau’s Laws.
Below are two videos made from the exercises shown at the DS10/Inter9 Grasshopper class at the Architectural Association.
The first video shows the trail left by points constrained by springs, end points and gravity. The Arch moves up and to the side, leaving a beautiful trace which reminded me of the pictures of Edouard Muybridge. It was done with Grasshopper and the free Kangaroo plugin by Daniel Piker.
The second video is a very simple example of recursion using Hoopsnake byVolatile Prototype for Grasshopper: A line rotates on another line and this new line becomes the currrent one on which the rotation is done and so one and so forth. Depending on the angle of the rotation and its location on the curve, these amazing patterns get created.
It has almost been already a year that Toby and I started tutoring DS10 at Westminster. One of our main ambitions was to link physical and digital experiments so that one feeds the other.
Physical reality is much more than surfaces on a screen therefore students created complex parametric models working as systems linked to many forces (gravity, environment, structure…etc…) and not just finished objects. These very precise digital models allow students to implement what they learn from their physical models, to simulate even more design options and further understand the rules behind them.
To do so, they used Grasshopper and its numerous plugins provided by generous developers. Grasshopper is a graphical algorithm editor integrated with Rhinoceros 3D modelling tool and a 18,000 strong community exchanging ideas and helping each other on the Grasshopper3d.com forum.
Below are most of the printscreens that I used to help the students with their journey into parametric modelling which is based on help that I also received previously. I hope that this will help others to design amazing things! If you have any questions on one of the images, please do not hesitate to ask.
Below is my favourite image: packing balloons on a surface using Kangaroo (with Emma Whitehead)
This example shows an animation of my ‘work-in-progress’ Grasshopper definition that uses Hoopsnake to recursively perform a ‘copy by mirror’ function on a geometric form. The two examples are based on a cube and a tetrahedron. The growth is linear; expanding by one module with each step. The position of each new module is determined by a new randomly selected face of the preceding module.
I would like to develop the definition so that it doesn’t self intersect, so any comments with ideas on how to achieve this would be appreciated!
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