DesignReForm

These are some screenshots of a project I've been developing at work.  It's a combination of using Grasshopper to generate geometry and RhinoScripting to analyze and extract information about the geometry.

The setup is a generalized tower floorplate (of any polygonal shape, in this case a square) that is then tapered, twisted and offset (or any combination of the 3 options) over the height of the tower.  Any twisting causes the tower envelope to become a doubly curved surface (see curvature analysis) which is problematic when you want to construct the facade with a minimal number of flat panel sizes.

I used Grasshopper to generate only flat panels of a given size and spacing and, in the case where there is an extreme lean or offset to the tower, to increase the panel height by a set increment as necessary.  The colors of panels in the last image, sorted via a script, indicate the number of panel types.  You can see vertical bands of color that change when the step in panel height occurs and that each of the end panels represent a unique condition.

So far so good.

Cheers,
taz

This is sweet!

taz

how did you make the panels in gh?  i took a crack at recreating it by subdividing the slab edge curve and then finding the nearest points on the edge above.  however, i'm not getting any good result.  your help is much appreciated.

t 

tnarch,

I must admit there is kind of a trick since you can't create all the panels at once.  To get things to work I used only a pair of edges per face to generate the panels (which are basically just boxes translated around) and then baked the results for each floor.

For other specific aspects I developed tests, for example, to determine if the panels are leaning in or out, perform booleans for the edge panels, etc.

Everything went together fairly easily but it has ballooned to such a size that it is hard to navigate the definition (and track down problems).

I'm not sure if that helps or not...

taz