Module 3 (3 units)
Modeling approach:
Is anyone familiar with Attack on Titan? (Spoilers ahead). My inspiration for this shelter model was Eren’s ultimate Founding Titan form (shown below), particularly his enormous ribcage.
I’m not advanced enough to construct his titan’s obscenely creepy head or disproportionately tiny pelvis (not shown above), but I wanted to at least construct the most visually impressive part of this monstrosity, which is the massive skeletal rib cage he has going on there. Formally, it can certainly be used as a shelter-like structure.
Also, seen from another angle, you can tell that the bony protrusions above the rib cage are actually two sets of fin-like constructions that fan out from the center of his ‘body’, so I added those to my model as well.
I wanted to use Grasshopper for this exercise since I’ve used it in the past but have kind of fallen out of practice with it. I wanted to just refresh my Grasshopper skills, but I’ll probably go back to using Dynamo in future assignments.
Model images:
Anyway, here’s the final product.
The most visually important component is obviously the skeleton, but I added some frame panels because this is supposed to be a shelter assignment. Now I don’t image the ribs being necessarily structurally sound, so it’s possible this shelter will need to be suspended from somewhere or the base modified a bit in order to be practically implemented.
Coding process:
Upon completion, I took out all the necessary adaptive parameters and put them into a control panel for more cleanliness and ease of use — these are all the components you can adjust on the model!
As you can see, the script has a ‘link curve’ starting point — the structure generated here is based off a single curve that you draw manually in Rhino (obviously I could also just use Grasshopper to draw a line and link that but I find that linking curves will give more flexibility).
Upon drawing the curve, the script divides it using perpendicular frames and points, which use the same ‘number of ribs’ parameter.
Taking with me the skills we learned in the last module, the spinal curve is generated based on a sine function (I wanted to try this out in Grasshopper instead of Dynamo). Again, I used the distance and scaled it by the maximum ‘distance from start’ to get the angle that is inputted into the sine function.
Now that we have a function that scales based on distance, we can use the sine output values to scale other attributes of the massive skeleton, most importantly the ribs. I used arcs to model the ribs, and extended each rib by a scaled sine output number, which makes it so that some ribs are shorter than others in a patterned way!
Since I want the fin heights to follow the same length pattern as the rib lengths, I used the same sine output values (albeit rescaled) to create the boney fins. However, since I also want a ‘fan’ effect that radiates from the center point of the spine, I needed to retrieve the center point from the original divided curve and then generate vectors from that point to each of the spinal points. I then created lines from those vectors, which became the fins. I also generated a spine polyline.
Then using the spine polyline as the axis of rotation, I rotate the two sets of fins outward.
Meanwhile, I also created a lofted surface from the rib curves and gave the surface diamond panels. No particular reason for the diamonds, I just like the way they look:
This isn’t a direct copy from Eren’s titan form, but his titan does have some disgusting fleshy tendons drooping off from certain skeletal parts, so I just created a series of catenary (subject to gravity) cable curves between the fins that I created to give this effect. I had to adjust the direction of gravity so that the catenaries weren’t falling downwards but were falling in the direction of the spine.
As we learned in this module, I swept some custom sections along each skeletal component to create the actual structure.
Finally, I grouped together all the pertinent geometry and recolored certain components so they look more like bones. Obviously these can be changed though! The color controls were placed on the control panel.
I ultimately baked my original design into my Rhino file, but you can also create less visually gruesome designs with this Grasshopper script. For instance, this looks like a mermaid tail?
