Rhino - Implicit History and Flow Along Surface

Hi Dave, excellent tut (and website BTW)

Rhino is really getting even “awesomer” on an almost montly basis lately it seems. Will definitly be playing around with this technique, thanks a bunch

Fantastic tutorial, simple and very useful. Thanks for sharing this incredible tips, your blog is awesome!
_davide

Wow…Rhino 4 is world’s better than 3. Looks like I’ll have to upgrade.

Great tutorial… Keep up the good work

So I tried the loft, unfold and flow along surface with Rigid=Yes this week. There are several problems with this method. Firstly, unrollsrf only works with Developable Surfaces. Therefore, I had to divide the lofted surfaces into many ellipses first, and loft small pieces of developable surface with the developable surface plugin. Then I had to merge the strips back into one big surface, and then unroll srf. After that I overlaid a pattern of surfaces on the unrolled surface, trimmed the pattern to fit inside the unrolled surface (took way too long, I don’t know if grouping the shapes will help…). Then I did flow along surface with Rigid=Yes, but the problem was that the flow along surface command doesn’t allow me to change U,V orientation so the pattern was all mangled and messed up. I can’t even begin to see how it rationalizes the component population pattern. With Rigid=off, the patterns bend and stretches alot, mangles in certain places, and left several “gaps” between the patterns.

The paneling plugin is good for making regular and repeated panels, but I haven’t figured out if it will be able to take several components and populate the surface with them. Currently, I use paracloud for doing such things. I hope to be able to do that with paneling tools, flowalongsrf and ExplicitHistory with the ability to set components to Rigid=Yes.

Paracloud is good when you’ve gone through an early schematic design, and have several ideas that you want to further investigate. It is because Paracloud ability to easily link geometry from Rhino to Excel, and its ability to designate specific components to be populated on surfaces precisely where you want them to be via the matrix. It is not the fastest nor the most intuitive, but when you want to have some data-driven (or I like to think of it as data-assisted) design, such as solar exposure on a facade, or wind penetration through perforations on facades or roofs, it is great to use Paracloud as a link. I also saw David’s 3dmax tutorials with techniques aiming at resolving similar design concerns, one involves importing heightmaps, and the other one called parametric panels - responds to sun. Paracloud has an internal sun-exposure calculation tool and will generate the data onto your surface matrix, however, I needed to study my model in an urban environment, where there are tall shadows from neighbours. I used another tool and got exposure maps on the extreme days of sun exposure as images, and I will try and see if I can treat that as a “heightmap” on a facade. Paracloud can import images and create a matrix out of black and white heightmaps, and I was told that they are working on interpreting color maps for later versions. I will try David’s 3dmax method for quick modelling, and will use Paracloud when the design of the overall massing and the facade components are more solidified. Now if Paracloud and Explicit History can work together…

nsruc

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question for tekbot - are you referring to Alias Studio tools? can you speak about how and what for you use Alias Studio?
thanks!

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where can I get a paracloud trial or demo?

hi David,

i am trying to follow your tutorial but i can’t seem to

rotate the curve. it simply rotate and move, doesn’t

update the whole surface.

hi david!!

i’m tring to do that, but when i select the curve in the middle of the shape , it does’nt deformed.

thanks
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Thanks! It’s such a helpful website!