Grasshopper Basics

This photo on the left shows the creative prompt at the bottom of the first tutorial. The interface is really difficult to get used to, and I also accidentally deleted all of my work once, but it's starting to make more sense.

Grasshopper Cylinders

I took screenshots of all of the parts along the tutorial, but the last activity of designing your own shapes was the most interesting to put here. Combining pipe with polar array worked really well in my eyes. Unlike the one shown above, almost every parameter in this one is changeable. You can change the radius of the entire shape, the height, the number of vertical bars, and the thickness of the pipe; all with sliders.

First Impressions

Totally unnecessary, but I did want to write down my first impressions. There seems to be a lack of online documentation. I kept trying to look up what component I needed to do something (like get individual points from a polar array), and I had no success finding it. I also find it mildly annoying that the screenshot/view of all of the components doesn't actually have enough info for someone to recreate it themselves. When you set information for a component, it doesn't show that it was changed. This means that blank inputs for a point could be (0,0,0), or they could be (98, 43, 27). Lastly, there are two components for line, both of which look different and I find very confusing. It also makes it much harder for me to add the component quickly.

Torus Tutorial

The tutorial only showed how to create a torus with polar array and loft. I also practiced the other ways: piping, as well as revolving. They all look the same. There weren't really any challenges or successes with this tutorial-- it was very straight forward.

Tesselations

Not much to say about this. It's really cool, and this seems to be one of the main advantages of using grasshopper and being able to edit things like cell count really easily. It's starting to become easier to figure out how to use everything. There wasn't anything all that challenging about this tutorial.

Voronoi 2D

Like the last one, this was very much straightforward! I didn't have any issues with it. The scale thing seems very useful, as well as voronoi 2d and populate 2d.

2D Illusion Patterns

This was one of the more difficult tutorials. A lot of the components such as maelstrom, bezier spin, and shift list felt very abstract, which made it harder to figure out how to create a predictable outcome. Other than that, divide curve seems very useful, and I created a pretty cool pattern in the end.

Manipulating Patterns

I knew I wanted to use the Voronoi pattern, so that's the tutorial I started with. The only in-rhino operations I did was create a single outline curve for a single pattern, and a "join" command at the end. I wanted to turn it into a somewhat-natural looking shape, and below is what it spiraled into. It took a lot of troubleshooting, and truth be told, it's still not quite bug-free (more on that later). The photos below are one iteration of the design.

Below is another version of the design. The Voronoi initially had trouble exporting, so it gave a really cool result without it. But, It doesn't feel like it'd be structurally strong enough. Eventually, I fixed it, but that wouldn't export into Cura because of non-manifold edges and maybe some other issues. That's because of the way I joined the meshes in rhino, I think

So, after playing around in Rhino forever, I decided to do a quick-fix (that looks like it should work, but I haven't started printing yet, so we'll see). I imported it into Blender, clicked "check all" for 3D-Print Toolbox, and then clicked "make manifold".

Now, the slice button actually works and slices the model, so we'll see whether it is actually printable!

Printed Shape

It printed first try (which is rare), and now the supports just need to dissolve. Will update when it's finished.

Final Manipulating Patterns Project

This was a really fun project! The biggest challenge was probably creating the complex voronoi shape in grasshopper, but a success was that it 3D-printed first try. The supports took about 2 days to dissolve.

Curves & Surfaces

The whole thing going on with Deconstruct Domain and Evaluate Surface is still confusing to me, but I think I'll get the hang of it eventually. It seems really useful, and it also looks really fun to use.

Graph Mapper

I was originally a little scared because "Graph Mapper" is an intimidating name, but the tutorial wasn't too hard! The hardest part for me is probably that many of the functions created on the graph were a little unpredictable and the shape that it created did not always match up. Other than that, it can create some really cool shapes and definitely seems useful for creating more complex and organic shapes.

Paneling with Surface Morph

Paneling seems like a really useful thing to learn, but I found this tutorial pretty difficult. The job of each component is pretty abstract, so I found myself copying the tutorial without actually knowing what it's doing. This also slowed down my computer a ton, so I found it difficult to work with in that way. But, it's nice that you can get such a cool result with a pretty simple setup.

Voronoi Sphere

This tutorial went pretty smoothly overall. I had no issues with installing weaverbird, and most of it makes sense. The most difficult part for me was the "mesh colours" component at the end, and it took forever for me to get it to a place where it even looked moderately okay. But, this shape looks really cool, so I'm glad I did it!

Voronoi Cell

Okay, so I don't like weaverbird. It makes everything so much easier and efficient and allows things that aren't otherwise possible to be done, but it's also so abstract and I don't quite understand what half the components are doing. But the coloring for this one was a lot better and made more sense! So, one success was that it worked out and looks really cool (especially the colors!) and one challenge is that weaverbird is very difficult.

Elk basics

This entire tutorial was a pain for me. First, I couldn't find the imported geometry, then once I found it and managed to scale it back down, I my zooming was messed up and I couldn't get back to the regular build plane. And, many times that I tried to scale, grasshopper and rhino would both crash. I basically had to redo the entire tutorial for homework. I solved this by using Rhino/Grasshopper on a faster computer. I also learned a couple of new tools, one was the radial menu (which allowed the disabling of the preview of multiple components, which was very convenient), and the other was the "zoom to selected" button. In the end, I overcame all the obstacles, and I got to what you can see on the left!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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