Tuesday, September 18, 2012

PATTERNISING WITH THE NATIVES

This post was nudged into being by viewer response.  A couple of comments on my last post with links attached.  Don't know if/when I will ever get around to Rhino/Grasshopper.  I think in the end you have to make a judgement call about where to focus your energies and for me it's less about clever modelling and more about exploring the intersection of ideas. 


The link to islamic patterns didn't really show me anything new, but it did supply the extra impetus to try harder to apply some of these geometries to PBP (Panel by Pattern).  The one I chose has a fairly simple rectangular repeat, roughly in a 5x3 proportion.


A little drafting work on top of a jpeg image gave me some useable spacings for points that can be used to generate a grid. 

There is a lot of hosting points on lines, selecting two at a time, & creating spline by points.  After a while you need to start using host by intersection, again repeatedly.  Eventually I have pieces of reference line that sit on top of the grid and will be used as paths to sweep along a tubular framework.


This involves lots & lots of host point, show reference plane always, set plane, draw circle, make radius a real dimension, apply a parameter.  After a few of these, I discovered that you can copy the assembly of point-circle-dimension into empty space and then rehost the point on a different line.  That's a big time-saver.


Eventually I have a curtain panel that looks like this, which should be testable.



Create an undulating surface as an in-place mass. 


Divide it so that the grid is rectangular in roughly the right proportions, load up the panel and amazingly it worked. 


Definitely worth doing a few more of these.  Took a couple of hours to create the panel, but if I make 3 or 4 of them and put them up for download maybe someone else will pick up the challenge and create a couple.

About half way through I picked up from my stats page that there was traffic coming from Revit Forum.  Following the link I discover people are enjoying my recent posts which supplied the extra motivation to finish off this post.  Sadly the original topic related to another Dubai based firm which has has a failure of nerve in relation to BIM.  Please don't be discouraged.  It's taken me 7 years of grinding away to get to where we are now at GAJ; multiple setbacks, hearbreaks, "is it all worth its".  Fortunately my principal has been very supportive, but it's been hard work with some of the other seniors.  Happy to say that we are now well past the point of no return and I have the pleasure of spending much of my time inducting some very bright young architects from all around the world into the delights of Revit. 



Do not despair.  We are heading in the right direction and sooner or later everyone will have to wake up.
 

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