Escape to the Trees

Overview of the Tool:

Are you a stressed-out student? Have you been dreaming of a place to escape the hustle and bustle of the world? Do you want a place to nap, meditate, read or all of the above? Look no further - “Escape to the Trees” can help you find your new happy place with the click of a button.

This tool is designed to automate the design for a tree house and customize the design to your liking. On the structural end, the length, width, number of columns/beams, interstory height, beam and column type can all be adjusted to your liking, based on the space you have available outdoors. In the architectural sense, the color, material and finish for the walls, floors, slide, and ladder can all be toggled to your liking. The goal of this tool is to turn that childhood fantasy of a treehouse into a reality. I wanted to create an automated tool that designs the customized treehouse and provides the realistic cost and hours of assembly that will go into the design. By the ease of this tool, I hope more children will get their dream, adults will finally have a place to escape, and even schools could potentially easily assemble treehouses across campuses for their students to relax in.

How to Use:

Watch this quick tutorial on how to use the tool so you can create your own dream treehouse (and see how much it will cost and how long it will take to assemble).

The Inner Workings of the Tool:

The dynamo script for this tool certainly took a long time to get going because I wanted to produce the treehouse on both the structural and architectural fronts. I insalled the beams and columns structurally so it would have the appropriate support. I then installed the walls, floor, and roof through dynamo so they could all be customizable with options for dark, medium, or light wood. Below is the overall screenshot of my workflow in dynamo and the look of the treehouse as an output in dynamo without any of the details from Revit added. Something to note is that due to the architectural details of the ladder and slide, I had to keep the base at a constant height or else these inputs would notupdate to the appropriate heights and the dynamo script was getting out of my field of knowledge. So for the purpose of this assignment, the biggest constraint is an inital 10 ft height. Otherwise, everything else is customizable in the app.

Diving into the Script:

The first part of my dynamo script is the customizeable inputs. This includes all of the dimensions, column/beam types, number of beams and columns, and finishes for the walls, floors, and roof. Likewise, the color of the ladder can be changed. Regarding the color, the color palette node does not work with player so I had to switch to using the color by RGBA approach for the ladder. Likewise, the inputs that are left constant include the offset, liner of slide (since it was such a small parameter), and the base height as noted previously.

Next, the baseline points and columns were created to initialize the first story of the treehouse. A grid of nodes is created from an origin point to formulate the baseline columns.

The geometry of the first and second stories are then created on a node and line basis.

The structural framing, in the beams and columns in the first and second stories are then created. One of the custom nodes, BeamSystem.PlacementwithQuadPoints, from the Module 8 notes is used for the beam systems on both stories.

The architectural details including walls, floor, and the roof are then all added.

Additonally, the customizeable architectural details including the ladder and slide were also created.

Finally, the outputs that are found from calculations using the surface area and total volume for the treehouse are calculated. These outputs include the estimated hours of assembly (with 6 minutes per cubic ft) and cost of construction (with $20 per cubic ft).