Gents,
Is there any way to model this thing in grasshopper? It’s about 15’ long and 3’ radius at the top. Appreciate your time and help.
Thank you.
There ae several of these on display at the Chihuly Pilchuk glassworks outside Seattle. They are assembled from hundreds of individual glass “corkscrews”, each of which is made by stretching a bubble of glass out to a point and then curling this around a steel rod. While the glass is still hot enough to move the rod is removed and one or more helpers bend the shape in slightly different directions (I call these curves wiggles.)
When there are enough of these they make a steel armature with short arms pointing in different directions. Then they simply put a corkscrew on each arm. The resulting sculpture is very heavy.
You could make the individual corkscrew parts by tweaking a spiral curve and MultiPiping it. I think it would be tiresome to get the wiggles made properly and in the right places, but I reckon this could be done by dividing the spiral curves into a series of points and then using Gumballs to move some of the points around. You’d have to refit a curve to the new set of points.
Variable pipe radii would be needed to get each corkscrew to end in a point. (Some of the ones in the image don’t do this - I’ve not seen such an actual piece so I can’t give any suggestion for those. Frankly they look out of place to me.)
Assembling the piece requires an armature of course, and I don’t know how the people at the Pilchuk make these (they don’t like to show how they do things.) My guess is they start at the bottom and add an arm based on the particular corkscrew piece they are going to attach. Obviously this would be a very tedious procedure. Which is one reason why the piece in the photo, is it were for sale, would probably be priced around $200,000.
I would start with a general conical/oval shape like an upside down stretched egg.
Then divide the surface or use Populate 3D to put a bunch of points on the surface.
Then evaluate the surface normals at those locations to get normal aligned planes.
These will be your spawn points.
Then create a single corkscrew glass fixture by first making a truncated cone shape or extrude to point or cone shape or revolving an allium bulb profile shape like in the image above.
Then twist this geometry to get a corkscrew.
Get the bottom plane of this item and plug that into an orient component A input and the B input gets the planes from the first elongated egg shape.
This should spawn a whole bunch of the glass corkscrews on the overall “form”.
You can introduce random rotation into the B surface planes to make the glass pieces look more natural like the image above.
You can also randomly assign colored glass materials to the list of corkscrews.
That’s a general idea of how to approach it.
-Populate3D or
-Divide Surface
-Evaluate Surface
-Twist
-Orient
-Random
Those are the majority of the nodes you would need