The Court Configurator
The Outdoor Racket Court Configurator is a parametric design assistant tailored for urban planners and facility developers seeking to optimize multi-sport site footprints. The tool automatically generates compliant outdoor layouts starting with a mandatory minimum of three tennis courts and optional pickleball courts, strictly adhering to critical safety run-out zones and user-adjustable inter-court spacing. By instantly calculating total square footage, perimeter fencing, and potential paving volume, it streamlines complex planning and material estimation into a fluid, data-driven digital interface.
Intended users
The primary users, would include concept architects, sustainability consultants, and pre-con estimators and normal day people curious to see if they want to build outdoor recreational facilities. Decision makers could be owners of schools and gyms to just see how a tennis court layout would look like.
Need you’re trying to provide a solution or support for
Designers currently lack a real-time, unified tool that balances structural geometry, financial cost, and operational/embodied carbon footprint simultaneously. Schools also would use this if curious to see how a design could look and average cost and square footage within a click of a button.
Right now, an architect designs a form in Revit or Rhino, sends it to an estimator for costing, and sends it to a sustainability expert for carbon modeling. This disconnected loop takes days or weeks. A Generative Design tool that connects geometric inputs directly to a cost and square footage dashboard, allowing users to find the cheapest, most sustainable design instantly before committing to full production modeling.
This could also be used for non-technical people to build courts to quickly see their plan instantly without any professional help. For example, if I owned a gym and wanted 6 tennis courts and 3 pickleball court it would it generate the best optimal configuration.
Inputs
- Tennis Court Quantity: Slider ranging from 3 to 12+ (Default baseline set to 3).
- Pickleball Court Quantity: Slider ranging from 0 to 24+ (Default baseline set to 0).
- Inter-Court Distance (Side-by-Side): A slider to control the physical gap between adjacent courts sharing a common pad (Variable from 10ft to 18ft)
- Layout Array Style: A toggle to switch the arrangement (e.g., all courts in a single row vs. split into multiple rows/enclosures).
Underlying logic of the model you’ll implement
Baseline Generation: The script automatically instantiates 3 Tennis court bounding boxes positioned side-by-side along the X-axis from a 0,0,0 origin point.
Parametric Inter-Court Spacing: Every time the tennis slider increases past 3, or the pickleball slider increases past 0, the script applies the user-defined Inter-Court Distance ($D_{int}$) to dynamically space out the next boundary box: Boundary Merging: The tool automatically wraps a perimeter boundary line around the combined outer edge of all generated courts to simulate the concrete pad and fence line. The system multiplies the total length ($L$) and total width ($W$) of this outer boundary to output the absolute minimum property area required.
Lastly, generate an image for you to see.
Outputs
Dynamo showing the court lines, the clear spaces between them, and the outer perimeter fence layouts text.
Total Perimeter Fencing Linear Footage
Total Site Footprint ft^2
Roadmaps
- Day 1: Set up your fixed outdoor court sizes using rectangles and lock your slider minimums to 3 or more for Tennis and 0 or more for Pickleball.
- Day 2: Link an Inter-Court Distance slider to a translation node so the courts automatically array side-by-side without overlapping.
- Day 3: Wrap a master bounding box around the entire layout and use a math node multiplying Length by Width to instantly calculate the total required square footage.
- Day 4: Clean up your graph with colored group labels and add a final calculation node for total concrete paving volume.
Nice to have
Orientation Guide: Add a visual vector line indicating True North to help planners align the courts North-South for sun mitigation. A slider to toggle cost for types of courts. (some tennis courts use clay, grass, or just hard surface)