Building onto the bus stop I created for Module 3, I now made my structure dynamic so that is in constant dance with the sun throughout the day. Each panel responds to how directly sunlight is hitting it and adjusts its color and opening size accordingly. In the final workflow for this bus stop the designer can easily manipulate the following parameters: number of panels in the U and V directions, three colors to determine color gradient (low, medium, and high), and range of aperture for the panel openings. Similarly, the designer can decide to use the part 1 script to map an image onto the panels of the bus stop, and very easily manipulate the orientation the image is displayed (mirror or flip the image with just one click), as well as whether the panels are embossed or debossed in response to the panel’s color. Below are some snapshots and a breakdown of the workflows.
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Mapping an Image and Embossing/Debossing
Start with the defining curves and surface from Module 3
Step 1: Panelize surface and create adaptive panels to match the designer-defined grid. Via sliders, the designer chooses amount of panels to be placed in the U and V directions.
Step 2: Select an image you want to map by using its file path. If image doesn’t map properly, you can easily transpose it by changing a “0” to a “1”. Finally, via two easy-to-use boolean operators, the designer decides whether they want to flit the image in either the horizontal or vertical direction, or both.
Step 3: The image is mapped onto the surface by overriding each panel’s color. The designer can then use two sliders to manipulate the thickness (and thickness range) of the panels based on their brightness and decide if they want the panels to pop out (emboss) or dip down (deboss) to create a textured effect.
Compute Sun Directness and Have Panels Respond Dynamically
Start with the surface from Module 3 and panelize it using panelize by surface (instead of by points)
Step 1: For each panel, compute the normal from the surface at the center point of the panel. In parallel, the graph computes the sun settings for a given location/date/time, and then finds the dot product of these two vectors. For the value to be useful later on to adjust panel properties, the dot product is remapped to a range from 0 to 1.
Step 2: Assign a color and an opening size to each panel based on the resulting dot product (which is indicative of the directness of sunlight onto the panel). Here, the designer has the option of establishing which colors will determine the color range that will correlate to low-, medium-, and high sun directness.
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