WIP - Pillow Builder & Party Balloons Too! 🎈

[michaelvollrath]

Hi Everyone,

I’m creating a decorative pillow geometry generator.

Why?

I work on a ton of projects that have custom pillows we need to generate for FFE production and/or conceptual renderings of spaces. We constantly are converting existing models found online or building them from scratch each time and they get rather heavy and tedious.

I set out here to create a “simple” script that takes a closed input curve and essentially inflates the path, applies random surface deviation within tolerance, and lets the user set an edge type from the 3 most common we come across of “piped/welt”, “knife edge”, and “flange”.

We also end up with a lot of tassel edges or “fuzzy/furry” edges but that’s more of a V2 part of the script probably and will involve some “arraying along the seam path with pseudo gravity alignment”
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This is very much still WIP but I’m sharing here with the community in case others find it useful in this state for their own workflows.

I would love suggestions on how to improve the code and/or gh script but I probably don’t have time to actually make too many changes and/or support this. More of a “chip away at it if I can” kind of thing.

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It is rather slow right now at about 10 seconds per pillow creation so I have a wish list roadmap of the following:

-optimize the paths/logic generator to reduce geometric complexity or calculation complexity
-ability to refine the the polycount dynamically
-most importantly the ability to properly UVW map a texture to it dynamically so that the fabric actually looks correct in the models/renderings.

Anyways, do what you will with it and let me see your pillow creations! I’d love to improve it!

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Input Sample:

Output Result:

Result with a little texture mapping applied:

WIP piped edge:

WIP knife edge:

WIP flange edge:

Graph Space:

Grasshopper script with python code inside:

FUNCTION_Pillow_Builder_01a.gh (50.7 KB)

[keithscadservices]

Glad I found this because mere months before you created this, I was spending hours and hours creating pillows. Lots of manual point editing!!

Can’t wait to try this out . Thanks so much for sharing it!!

[michaelvollrath]

@keithscadservices you’re welcome, have fun!

Let me know if you have a better method of texture mapping. I think Rhino 9 grasshopper has texture mapping nodes but I haven’t had a chance to get into it.

One of the common issues is users always want any fabric they specify to be “hot swappable” on a pillow but that requires good UVW mapping to look right where the fabric goes all the way to the pillow seems.

[keithscadservices]

I don’t even know how to texture map in GH1. Manually, outside GH it’s not too bad but sometimes I have to explode the objects. And also try to model any object with as few surfaces as possible - Two surfaces for the top / bottom of the pillow (or even just one, folded just like some real pillows) and a separate surface for the seam.

AI is really changing how much detail I go after since you can upgrade images so easily now and get rid of small patches of bad texture mapping.

[michaelvollrath]

@keithscadservices

I don’t even know how to texture map in GH1

I believe it’s only possible in scripting calls to the API in R8. R9 gh1 does have nodes though which is great.

@keithscadservices

AI is really changing how much detail I go after since you can upgrade images so easily now and get rid of small patches of bad texture mapping.

Yea it is an interesting workflow opportunity being able to get the dimensional constraints and general shape of a scene together and being able to embellish it so dramatically.