Stage 1

Going into this project, I didn’t have a very clear plan in mind, but I knew I eventually wanted to end up incorporating three guiding sine wave curves for the panels on the top, with non-regular beams. I think what I ended up with after this stage and the next are a little unrealistic considering structural stability, but I’d like to think it’s possible.

Largely, I’ve ended up with a large over hang that could serve as a bus stop or something you’d stand under while waiting for your ride home. In some manners, it kind of looks like a bug, since the beams are so thin.

Parameters:

• Number of panels, across or up and down the structure as seen from above
• Width, Depth, Height of the structure
• Number of beams across the x axis, for example we are seeing 4 in this image

Stage 2 - Transforming Your Geometry

In this section I’ve added parameters to flex the guide curves for the top surface’s amplitude and frequency.

Central Curve Flex

Outer Edges Flex

The shape of the surface from above is now flexible in the y-axis, determined by three different functions (1 asymptotic, 1 quadratic, 1 cubic).

I’ve changed how the ground point to surface points are partitioned which gives us more ways to form beams. There are some limitations here in that there are a lot of configurations that are not physically unstable. Additionally, I couldn’t set a dynamic range for the number slider dependent on a previous variable, so it does break sometimes.

We can also scale the ground point locations in the y-axis, which also gives us flexibility for the beams, especially since we have more configurations based in the previously mentioned parameter.

In terms of limit testing, I have set a limit for most of the parameters such that many values cannot be negative and/or cause anything to break because of that factor. If I minimize the parameters, they do not return to the original form, because I had initially set certain scalar values, but the bottom of the range for some sliders is below that exact scalar. In terms of limits and constraints, the biggest issue I ran into was the general structural integrity of changing the partitioning of points to form the curves for the beams. I don’t think there’s really a good way to tell what is going to work or not, especially if you also flex the amount of panels that there are.

If I set everything to the max, we do end up with something a bit odd looking and definitely not comfortable to be sheltering oneself under. I think don’t think this is structurally sound, again, because there are very few connection points to the amount of weight of the rest of the beam when viewing from the side view. Additionally, the hanging part of the beams are very far out, because the ground point scaling doesn’t scale from both sides equally. It feels quite hazardous overall.