Grasshopper Tutorials by Kristof Crolla

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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Koch Division

Progression of a Koch snowflake as it is described by a recursive definition I wrote in grasshopper

Koch snowflake in Grasshopper

Application of the same principle for a regular tetrahedron made through a recursive hrasshopper definition..

Koch tetrahedron

Paper model for Koch tetrahedron

Paper model

29/09/12 Grasshopper Plugin Workshop

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.

A Year of Grasshopper Experiments with DS10

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)

Random Linear Growth – Hoopsnake

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!

Grasshopper and Hoopsnake

This video shows a summary of the potential using grasshopper combined with Hoopsnake.
The intention is to be able to multiply the component to a large amount of them by controlling the angles of rotation and building a mega-structure out of it.
As grasshopper is not very good on closed loop systems the Hoopsnake plug in comes in to repeat the definition over and over again in order to produce the outcome. The video indicates how you do it. Simply by double clicking on the Hoopsnake component in the definition and then adjust the preferable angles and click loop.
You can repeat the operation as many times as you want with different variation of angles and once the satisfied result is there you can bake the meshes into Rhino and then use them to render.
The possibilities are numerous and pretty exciting results can occur.