Hello
Does anyone have a recommended tutorial on how I can create this façade (Gallery of The Street Ratchada / Architectkidd - 4)? Essentially what I wish to explore is a triangulated façade with perforated panels. I’d want to be able to control the protrusions of these panels myself, not just randomizing them. Like working with a mesh and moving vertices, or even using attractors maybe?
Any help/guidance is appreciated.
Thanks! Appreciate your time and effort. I have a similar script (though yours has the aesthetic I need). But the randomizing factor is still present on both mine and yours. Is there a method for me to manually control which panels are rotated? I’m attempting to connect an MD slider to a remap and use that for the angles on my 3D rotate, but I’m still working on it.
Do you have a method for your script that allows me to manually select the panels to rotate? By the vertices or perhaps even with attractors?
It does not “rotate”. It deforms. That is why I think my definition is useless in terms of fabrication.
I think the right way is folding.
Kangaroo and Crane both can do that. Adding attractors would be a way to control the folding.
Interesting. I will open it and attempt to understand it. There must be some sort of attraction in the center, right? The panels must be held together, and the seams must not separate, which is challenging. This causes the same affect as the tutorial we discussed.
Tutorial available online at Rotating Facade based on Attractor Point, Curve Closest Point, Random - YouTube
This tutorial divides rectangular or square panels into four triangles and demonstrates how to control which triangles unfold using attractors. We want to accomplish the same thing (being able to control, not randomize) but without the triangle seams splitting (as seen in reference images attached to the initial post).
this is a very nice project I didn’t know about, awesome!
in the reference link you posted about the Gallery of the Street Ratchada it looks pretty clear that the basic XZ grid is respected, which means for that particular facade the corner points of each triangle are only able to slide along the Y axis:
the following detail of the facade section is also very interesting, as it shows that the points of each triangle are not allowed to take “any available Y value”, but they move in fixed steps: https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/589a/3013/e58e/ce85/5d00/000f/slideshow/29_Detail_Facade_Sections_Architectkidd.jpg?1486499852
looks like there are 6 fixed Y positions each corner point of each triangle can take (red line is the base-installation-line, never used, blue lines are the allowed Y positions)
this will become super useful for fabrication, because it will “automatically” cluster the triangular panels of the facade into groups
you have straight triangles and upside-down triangles, but they are the very same ABC triangles (be careful with corner order 
)
all the triangles have the very same front-projection, so you can easily describe them by just their Y value (again, assuming corner orders is correct):
for instance a triangle [A, B, C] with Y values [3, 3, 4] means points A and B have same Y value 3, and the point C has value 4
to make it easier, you can describe that very triangle also as [0, 0, 1], which is subtracting the smallest Y value for each triangle to all of the Y values of that triangle, because at the end you are just interested in offsets, which is something like “how many Y units is this point offset compared to the Y value of the one with lowest Y in this triangle?”
it becomes easy to see that triangles like [x, x, x+n] are the very same geometrical triangle, so they can be produced in batch, like [x, x, x+n] and [x+n, x+n, x]
not only that, but also other mirroring operation will produce identycal triangles
such as [x, x+n, x] and [x+n, x, x+n] are also the very same triangle, and the following:
[well, it depends… because if the panels have a different front and a back side (for instance some particular engraving that goes on one side only) then mirroring should not be taken into account, as it “flips” the triangles
if mirroring is not allowed, then I would also discard clustering triangles based on their surface area, which looked like the fastest and easiest option
generally speaking, the more Y “superpositions” you allow, the more combinations of different triangles you will get
another thing I notice is it looks like this red area has higher offset and deeper valleys, while the bottom left looks more shallow:
you could get similar results using attractors that push Y values more along top right corner, or inside an ellypse-shaped curved with center on top right corner
regarding the base pattern, it looks like diagonal lines runnig bottom right to top left, I believe we could get similar results with image sampling, but could as well be hand modeled (I mean hand-modelling + shallowing attractor) as it’s a very sculptural piece
sorry this is a lot of writing
[edit] some pictures led me to think sometimes a few panels were merged together into bigger ones (like merging 2 or 3 triangles together in some cases, expecially if both of them shared the very same slope) but looking at many more pictures on google made me believe those are all produced as single triangles, installed one by one on the underlying structure, in such a way to leave a beautiful distinctive “wireframe” gap everywhere
Thank you, this information is much appreciated! I’ll get started on a new iteration using this. Do you know of a way I can assign the 6 fixed y positions when I start pulling my vertices? Would moving these vertices to specified steps and then attempting to create surfaces after even be the right method?
this could work as an example, it’s just a fast sketch:
first you generate your mesh, then bake it to rhino (top part of the definition)
then you need to manually change the mesh in Rhino
then assign the modified mesh to the second line and it will remap all Y values into the ones defined by the text Panel Domain of Y superposition and the number of steps of your choice
Street_Ratchada_Sketch.gh (26.3 KB)
I think you might also get to the very same final result using half of the components
I’m new to grasshopper, but rather than manually modifying the mesh, I’m sure you could randomly assign a new Y value from a list of predefined values.
If random isn’t acceptable, then you could use a lookup table that assigns a Y value to a given point number.
Either method avoids needing to manually manipulate the model in a situation where many iterations are likely to be required.
agree, I’d personally go for image sampling, but understood he wanted to model them by hand
if u go for image sampling, consider that a very bad reverse image generation based on Y values of the original facade produce a heatmap like this… so don’t look for something too fancy
[X-points are even tripled to give similar aspect ratio]
well… it’s a bit off on some points to be honest, but good enough for the scope of this matter:
Street_Ratchada_section_to_Y_power.gh (418.7 KB)
This is really awesome! Personally, never used an image sampler before, this is really interesting. Looks pretty much identical to Street Ratchada.
To push it further is there a way to now morph this manually (not to resemble Street Ratchada) but making our own patterns?
Just wanted to thank @Quan_Li and @inno learned a lot from you guy’s this thread. Started another topic building off of this using an image I imagined with midjourney if you guys still find it interesting. Fractal patterns for triangulated façade?
By any chance can you share your Rhino viewport settings?
See this.
You set materials by assigning environment maps only in Rhino, then assign the material to the geometry again in GH`s Custom Preview.
I lost all my preference data after an unfortunate computer reboot, so I can not give you the .ini file right now.
