Before I dive into the new parts of this assignment, I wanted to explain why my structure looks a little different from last week! My structure from last week was circular and I wanted something with defined rows and columns to work with for the images. Additionally, though I liked the aesthetics of my last structure I wanted to play around in Grasshopper more and test out different types of curves. So, I decided to completely restart and build a new sculpture.
Initial Concept and Construction
I was inspired by the hatch shell concert venue in Boston, a building I have always loved. After constructing the basic shape using a set of curves and lofts, I wanted to add a new element that would highlight the capabilities of parameterization. Since it was called the “Hatch Shell” I thought about the curvy edge of calms and added in a cosine wave parameter to the bottom curves. I made the wave along the curve by calculating sub arc lengths (picture 1) and then converting those into a cosine wave (picture 2). I made the curves would small and increase in amplitude along the edge, eventually becoming big enough to be entrances into the structure. Finally, I brought the curve down a few feet and made the negative values flat to make the structure have more contact with the ground. Finally, I mirrored the edge curve, made a curve along the top spine and lofted the structure together (picture 3).
Creating “Flip” feature and Image
Once I had my surface, I created panels using lunchbox.
The above code shows my logic gate to flip/mirror the image. Essentially, I took my list of panels and reversed the order to flip the image horizontally and vertically. I then used the same method from lecture to apply an image to the surface.
Extruding based on brightness
To create the embossed/debossed effect I used the same image panel but set to brightness to extract brightness values. I applied a multiplier (to increase the effect) and sent the list of brightness values into a logic gate. If the gate is set to embossed, the brightness value is subtracted from the starting value, while if the gate is set to debossed, the starting value is added to the brightness value. Thought the function is red when its gate is closed, it still returns a null value, so the clean block removes the nulls before sending the list above.
Left: Embossed, Right: Debossed
Panel adjustment based on sun
First, I created the arc for the suns path and the sun the same way shown in the tutorials. Then, I created surface normal vectors for each panel.
Then, I used the dot product to calculate the directness from the sun and apply that to both the color and frame size.
Below is the structure with the sun just affecting the color:
Below is an image with the sun affecting both panel color and frame size:
Parameters
Most of the values I used for the structure are parameters, meaning most can be changed.
That includes:
- Curvature, length, height of initial buildings
- Amplitude and period of cosine wave sides
- Number of panels
- Radius and number of ribs (both directions)
- Image
- Flip/Mirror and Emboss/Deboss booleans
- Sun positioning
- Color