From the course: Learning Algorithmic Design with Grasshopper

Planning for material depth

From the course: Learning Algorithmic Design with Grasshopper

Start my 1-month free trial

Planning for material depth

“

- [Instructor] In this video, we'll get an overview of the basic form that we're going to be dealing with and talk about some ideas that we'll need to pay attention to as we work towards translating this digital form into something physical. Here I have an example of a two dimensional Voronoi pattern. So, that's this kind of cellular pattern that you see here, these kind of irregular interlocking shapes. And what I'd like to work on is translating this into an extruded three dimensional form. So, to get a real rough preview of what that's going to look like let's just select it. So, from the front view port I'm just going to click and drag and in the command line I'll use the extrude curve command. And I'd like to extrude this 20 centimeters. I happen to be working in metric here, but this process would be exactly the same if you're in inches. And I just want to make sure that the solid option is set to No. So I'll just type 20 centimeters here in the command line and hit enter. And this just gives us a real rough idea of what this would look like as an extruded three dimensional form. Now, to maximize the perspective, you port here. So, I can see, I have a pretty interesting form here. And I can imagine this being something like maybe a building facade design, maybe even a stain glass window. It could be a form for casting bricks or tiles, or something like that. The one common thread that we're going to see in any of those is that these cells are eventually going to made out of something physical. Now, right now, since we extruded from just individual curves each of these panels really has no depth to it. And that would present a problem if we were using this as a design to actually fabricate it in real physical reality. I'm going to go ahead and hit the Control Z here, to undo that extrusion. And let's jump back to our front view port and talk about a couple of steps we can take to get this toward something that would lend itself much more easily to being an actual physical object. So, the very first thing I'll do here is just take one of these cells and do an offset. So, just typing offset into the command line. We can use this command to give some depth to each one of the Voronoi cells. And I'd like to offset this 11 millimeters so I'm just typing 11 mm into the command line And Rhino is smart enough to grab those units for us. And I'd like to do it towards the inside of the cell and I'm doing this making sure that the corners are set to sharp. So, I can click anywhere inside the cell and I get that offset. Now, you can imagine going through each one of those individual cells and doing an offset. To save a little bit of time I've already gone ahead and made a layer with a bunch of offsets. So, I can turn my layers on, either with the icon here, or type in layer into the command line. Let's expand that here, and turn on my offsets layer. Now, I've got one duplicate there which is the offset I just made. So, I'll select that and get rid of it. You can see each cell has an offset so now there's some depth and lets take a look and see what happens when we do this extrusion. So, I'm selecting everything here. Let's do extrude curve again. Same distance, one difference, I'm going to set the solid option to yes this time. Since, this is going to be something that lends itself more to being physical so it makes sense to be solid so that it has, sort of, sides all around. Now, I'll use the same extrusion distance of 20 centimeters so I can just click enter and lets jump to perspective and see how that looks. Okay, that's pretty cool. Double click on perspective, maximize the view port here. So, now I can see that each one of my cell panels the walls actually have some depth to them. So, this is something that could help me to visualize, and plan for something that's actually going to exist in physical reality. One thing that I notice here is the joints are very irregular, right. This is not like your standard bookshelf where you have a nice ninety degree joint and that would be very easy to both fabricate and assemble. Here everything is going to be some weird custom angle and we're going to have to plan for that as we go through a couple of steps in drafting this through Grasshopper and Rhino. And we can plan for that with just a little bit of forethought. In the next couple of videos we'll talk about what exactly we need to do to make it easier on ourselves as we work towards making this into something physical.

Contents