How to torque and line up gridshell beams

Grasshopper
,
1

Hi,

I am working on a grasshopper script that creates a timber gridshell, operating on a 1.5m grid, as a barrel vault. I have managed to attain the arc geometries that I need for the spans and they intersect well, but I am having issues with the subsequent beam geometry.

GRIDSHELL VAULT
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I’ve noticed that these gridshells usually intersect in a perpendicular manner, each joint has something like a flat surface. In my crude attempt at modelling the beams I have created a set of beams that intersect at differing angles, and I am not entirely sure as to how to fix this.

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Above is the section of the script that I have created for this (as you can see it is very bare bones). I understand that the cross-sections of the beam have to rotate so that their bases are parallel with the barrel vault geometry, but I don’t know how to do this.

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Another thing worth mentioning is that the gridshell doesn’t meet the edges of the barrel vault nicely. I suspect this is due to the plane surfaces (lofted to create the beam) are not defined from the centre of the plane but rather from a corner. Unfortunately, I am not sure how to resolve this, as my grasshopper skills aren’t very good.

Any helps or tips would be appreciated.

GRIDSHELL.gh (19.6 KB)

2

Your Curve param is not internalized.

P.S. I’m not sure this old post is relevant but you might find it interesting?

significantly better in two respects:

  1. fine adjustment of beam crossing angles. [see “corners”]
  2. beam thickness, centered.

2 Likes
3

Thank you for this, it looks very relevant. I’m not really sure what the script is doing exactly though, would you mind describing the process for me?

4

The shape of the roof comes from the My Shape cluster created by someone else.

I use it to create two lines divided by PFrames that generate diagonal roof beams. The notable detail I remember is the ability to fine-tune center the position of beams at all four vertices (“corners”).

Don’t remember much else about how it works… Would have to analyze it.