Variable folding of an object

Grasshopper
,
1

Hi there, first time poster here! I’m (very) new to Grasshopper but have a crucial deadline next week and am in need of assistance from anyone helpful enough to guide me in the right direction.

Say I have vertical mullions (1000 cm height x 25 cm depth x 10 cm width) distributed every 50 cm along a 65 meter facade. On the side of these mullions I have to attach steel pieces (3 mm thick) of somewhat variable length (+/- 20%) but minimum of 70 cm that fold to a certain degree. Vertical spacing between these steel pieces should be also variable, but minimum 5 cm and maximum 15 cm.

For the love of God can anyone please help me out?

All this has to be exported to ArchiCAD afterwards as whatever (Morph, Object, etc.)

This picture is very representative for what I need to achieve: Interactive art facade by Rob Ley | Inspirationist

Thank you very, very much!

2

I could easily address this via C# code … but what could be the benefit for you?

General outline: Create a “flat” pts grid (or a pts grid in some BrepFace) where your Voxels are deployed and then play with some sort of random probability for creating (or not) a Voxel AND (if yes) some oher sort of probability for adding Voxels in the Z (normal to Surface) direction.

You can “combine” the probability part with some other arbitary logic (say Attractor Crvs, Pts, Objects, maybe a BitMap etc etc).

3

I am genuinely thankful for taking the time to reply but I can’t help but admit I have no idea what you just said. I’m an architect, very accustomed to designing “the old fashioned way” and have never in my life worked with these sorts of methods. Bad luck for me the beneficiary showed me this picture and said “THIS IS WHAT I WANT” - one week prior to the final deadline.

Sure, I am actively interested in learning… But can’t do it overnight.

So yeah, I’ll look into what you just said! Thanks again!

4

Well … I’m also an Architect who took the wrong turn long time ago (but I hate Computers like my sins truth to be said).

Other than that frequently people provide solutions based on GH native components … so cross fingers and trust your Karma.

5

Welcome to the forum Victor. You probably want to be a bit more explicit:

7

Not knowing GH almost at all, the workflow I’m imagining is somewhat like this:

  1. Create the Mullions in ArchiCAD at a fixed position (done)
  2. Import them to GH (done)
  3. Translate the vertical planar surfaces on one side of the vertical mullions as planes onto which I will attach the steel plates (added a Box parameter to the imported Mullions so I’m guessing this is somewhat done too)
  4. Create the steel plates in GH/Rhino
  5. Add variability to the steel plates (angle of rotation, dimensions, etc.) given certain attractors
  6. Distribute the steel plates on the vertical mullions on Z axis
  7. Grab a beer

Even to me this seems simple enough but I don’t know almost any of the parameters required to achieve this result.

8

If you can’t or don’t want to try it yourself, it sounds to me like you need to try and outsource it and post it in the jobs section.

1 Like
9

Of course I’d like to do it myself but I think you have a point. I might just head over there.

10

See this thread:

OT

@wim
I asked this in past. This forum really needs better tools to search from past threads.
We need to further categorize single posts.
We have gallery tag, good.
But very often a thread is resolved with a post that have a really good solution (often with a nice picture) but after some time it is “lost” in the rest of the forum.

For this thread, I remembered @HS_Kim did something similar (probably also many times) and I had to go through his posts, scroll down for a couple of minute, manually open the browser search function (because the ctrl-f version of this forum is not good), and search for “rotate” then “panel”, “facade”. And then I had to open all the posts that might be the one I remembered, until I found it.

2022-07-01 12_53_04-Profile - HS_Kim - McNeel Forum
2022-07-01 12_53_04-Profile - HS_Kim - McNeel Forum1958×2034 381 KB

(Lucky me, because I remembered the 2019 content, but the post I’ve found is more recent)
… it’s that “Randomized Curling” thread… no tags, title sort of misleading… aka “buried and forgotten content”.
I’ve found that only thanks to the “facade” keyword inside the name of the attachment…
Is this a proper search method?

If a post (not thread) is marked as solution and/or have a good amount of likes (and if it have a picture, even better), that post should have a way to be visible the same way we can explore posts with “gallery” tag.
Also, such posts should have their own tags!!
The post I’ve linked here ^ should have also “rotate” “pattern” “attractor” “facade” “panels” tags… imho.
There are a lot of users posting literal ART as simple replies to bad-categorized threads… and that content is simply lost!!

A lot of good content, that could be useful for new users, or as archive, as examples, etc… is instead lost. And new threads will come to ask again the same things, because search doesn’t help. And those new-but-already-seen posts sometime are even NOT replied at all, because who know how to do it already did many times in past and can’t be bothered to do it again!

If I could filter post by:

  • creator: Hs_Kim / Laurent Delrieu / Daniel Picker / (many others that I don’t want to offend by omitting them)
  • marked as solution OR received 4+ likes

and display the resulting posts like a gallery (attached picture visible, not just the title), it would be probably more interesting than the current gallery (because those posts have attached a .gh that anybody can use). For learning. For categorizing. etc…

Currently it’s bad. A shame.
Hope anybody is understanding what i’m saying…

1 Like
11

Yes I totally agree with this, though the keywording should be somewhat restricted in the sense that most keywords should be specific to the topic and perhaps two that are more general keywords that provide some chance of finding that topic when searching for something similar.

Sometimes I come across SEO style keywording that contains so many keywords/tags that are rather generic that the searcher will end up wading through a slew of topics that are not really relevant for the search intent and then it will not be much better than the current situation. Maybe a fixed choices list of keywords for solutions might be an option in addition to “free keywords/tags” to create some consistency and improve the chance for relevant search results.

1 Like
12

Check this example you can also use image sampler and you will find many examples and tutorials

image
image1654×652 139 KB

facade.gh (11.7 KB)

13

Ok, so I managed to achieve this result.

image
image1742×808 116 KB

What I’m struggling with right now is how to export the polylines that generated this pattern into archicad as walls or as anything for that matter.

Put simply, connecting a Wall, Morph, or anything with a Toggle to the output Polylines simply doesn’t show anything in ArchiCAD. However I get no error whilst doing so.

220701_Panouri-random-cu-lungimi.gh (9.6 MB)

Any ideas?
Thanks!