A couple of others before the tutorial

Vaguely trying to relate back to a building now, renders are poor but they get across a couple of ideas. Too lazy for captions just at the moment.

...and another

This is starting to look quite cool now, basically a Voronoi sphere which has been pulled around in modo. Next step to see if I can morph this geometry into another brep boundary (more closely related to my site).

Some strange artefacts in the render, not sure what's going on there, but the overall effect is OK.

Also starting to whack together a site model for placing my design iterations.

Another update

This may not look much, but I'm actually on the way to cracking a couple of things I'd been hoping to get my head around, so that's a good thing.

Curved faces on a single cell

Curved windows in faces

Plus my funny frame thing from before (which might get the chop pretty soon in favour of something more sophisticated)

 

...and a bit of cheating in modo to get this bevel effect on the faces (heading in the direction of triangular beams / trusses)

A couple of random GH things from last week

Nobody really seems to be using this blog to share or comment on ideas, but I'm going to persevere anyway.

I've got a few ideas on the go at the moment; here are just a couple of examples of Grasshopper investigations which might prove useful for my developed design.

The first one is a "birds nest" definition which wraps a swept profile around a bounding box (sphere, cube or whatever). Could be cool for screening or facade elements, something non-structural at any rate.

 
Second one is basically the same thing but deformed using one of the modo sculpt tools, not supposed to be a resolved design for anything, just exploring some ideas around furniture and ergonomics which have moved on a bit since I rendered this.

Last one didn't quite behave as expected, but is meant to link the cell boundary edge length to the diameter of the pipe, as the first stage of creating a structural frame where the members are sized according to their span (not the other loads on them at this stage, so it's pretty basic). Strangely, GH's ideas around what constitutes edge length and consequently the diameters seem pretty random, but the result looks quite interesting, if not pretty.

More soon.

Maya etc

Just a share...

Further to Anastasia's whirlwhind primer on Maya rendering, you can download all Autodesk software from here

http://students.autodesk.com/

for free by registering with a student account. That'll get you AutoCAD, Revit, 3dsMax, Maya, plus a bunch of other stuff if you want it.

More Voronoi weirdness

This is what happens when you take the type of geometry I showed on Friday, extract the edges of the cells, and extrude them into some kind of "structure". Not very cafe-like, but starting to resemble built form I think. Comments welcome...

More fun than weblogs

Come on and join the Grasshopper party.

No seriously, it's really fun, and seems to be taking up far too much of my time at the moment.

These images aren't strictly relevant, but represent my "aren't Voronoi diagrams cool" phase, which I expect I'll soon grow out of.

Images rendered in Luxology modo.

A1 panels

A1 panels as handed in, with a couple of mistakes I only noticed after making the pdf. Argh! Oh well, have a good weekend everyone!

Open publication - Free publishing - More amateur

Assignment one: week one

The story so far:

The focus over the first few days was to identify criteria by which I could select the optimum site for my coffee shop; to record the data; and to attempt to display as much of the outcome as possible in a single, easy to read graphic. It was working pretty well up to a point, but may need revisiting later.

I also identified some emotive, programmatic characteristics of coffee shop inhabitation (the dualities), which I'm beginning to explore this week and which will hopefully help inform the formal and spatial qualities of my design as the project develops.

The focus has now shifted from the urban scale to a small number of establishments, which I'm analysing in greater depth.

So anyway, here's the colourful part: