Form Finding

Fabric is an incredibly dynamic material, and because of that we chose to use it as our main tool when finding forms. Rubber bands are great, but they lack the capacity of fabric to shift and mold into hundreds of different forms. We used the tools we had available, namely drills, wood, and little sticks, to create a series of scenarios that the fabric could adapt to. These are the three we found the most interesting. Our landscape of wooden sticks allowed the fabric to fall freely, and in some cases we used rubber bands to accentuate certain elements of the form.

All Forms

Rhino Rendering of Form

Prusa Slicer Rendering

Beginning of Print

Final Product

Asymmetric View

Front View

Top View

Grasshopper Tutorials

Grasshopper Basics

Importing Points From Rhino to Grasshopper

Creating Points Directly in Grasshopper

Polar Array Using Grasshopper

Line With Two Points #1

Line With Two Points #2

Takeaways

This introduction to grasshopper was fun and engaging. I was a little scared coming into it seeing how complicated some of the shapes can get, but I was happily surprised to find the whole system as incredibly intuitive. I was happy to experiment with some of my new skills in the final section, creating and manipulating lines.

Grasshopper Cylinders

Cylinder Design #1

Cylinder Design #2

Takeaways

There were a lot of ways to make cylinders in grasshopper, and I found that the easiest way to create one was by creating a circle and extruding it up. I enjoyed experimenting with the radiuses and lengths of the cylinders in order to make some interesting designs.

Torus Design

I liked this tutorial because it introduced a lot of parameters that I can mess with in order to make odd shapes like the one to the left.

Tessellation Design

This has been my favorite tutorial so far because it shows me the power of the number slider. With on variable, the entire shape and gestalt of the design can change vastly. I think that's really cool.

Voronoi Design

The populate 2D component is really cool because it allows an element of randomness within parameters that you can set.

2D Illusion Pattern Design #1

This was the most complicated design yet, and I struggled a bit making sense of all the parameters that were included. The fun thing about grasshopper though is that once you set everything up you can just play around with the sliders until you get a design that you like. Here are my two favorite.

2D Illusion Pattern Design #2

Manipulating Patterns Design #1

Manipulating Patterns Design # 2

Printing Progress

Reflection:

This project was very fulfilling because it allowed me to take the skills I had learned in the previous grasshopper tutorials and apply them to a new medium. In this case, I used the Voronoi technique I developed before and put it into a circle instead of a rectangular boundary. I thought that this created a unique shape, something between an animal cell and a gear. I then extruded my curves and that's what created the cylinder shape I eventually fabricated. I had very few issues with the printing, and it came out great!

Top View

Perspective View

Side View

Curves and Surfaces Tutorial

This was a fun tutorial because I got to use components that I already knew in a new way. Even though this tutorial covered some more complex 3D surface offsetting, I really enjoyed the simplicity of the circles along a curve, so that's the design I invested time into.

Graph Mapper Tutorial

This tutorial was interesting because it tied into the math that I've learned in precalculus. The sum of the two sin graphs added up to create the final curve design and I think that's really cool

Paneling With Surface Morph

This tutorial introduced a lot of new components that I wasn't familiar with, but I'm excited to get more used to using them as I progress in my parametric modeling skills.

Voronoi Cell

This was my first real wave bird project, and I was really impressed with the amount of new components that came with adding the library. These were really intricate, but I liked how moving around my sliders was able to really change the shape of my cell.

Sphere Voronoi

This has been my favorite tutorial so far because I'm starting to envision ways that I can incorporate these new techniques into future projects for this class. I especially like the way that the cells of the sphere jutt out randomly, I think it adds a lot of personality and variability to the surface.

Elk Basics

As someone who has an interest in civil engineering, I'm really interested in the more complex implications of elk and its tools. I wonder how it would be able to model public trasnit opitons, as that's something that I really enjoy seeing visualized.

Creating 3D Objects with Rhino

Our prompt was to create something that could support someone's body weight using the panel surface morph tools in grasshopper. We chose to come up with something resembling a sandwich, with different materials being different ingredients within the sandwich. The preliminary sketches are included to the left.

3D Printed components

Our 3D components were designed to resemble marshmallows, which are typically included in a smores sandwich. We had a couple iterations and failed prints before we got a product that we were happy with.

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