PEDI-MENTAL GYMNASTICS

 I’m going to come back to the Pantheon family, but for that I will need an “all-purpose pediment” which I can nest into multiple classical temples and churches.

Ideally it should have a small number of driving parameters which can be hooked up to the host family.  We can take that all-purpose starter and tweak it to better suit the host… depending on stuff like “is it Doric or Ionic?” or “what level of simplification do we want in this situation?”

Sometimes good ideas pop into my head just as I’m settling down for the night.  Best to jot things down before they evaporate from short-term memory, and visual ideas usually get captured on my Samsung note using Sketchbook Pro.  I saved a couple of versions of the “thinking aloud” sketching for my “Generic Pediment” family.

The main issue here is how to keep things fairly simple while producing a convincing pediment and allowing for swapping out the profiles to better represent a variety of treatments for different buildings and contexts.  I want this to work for the main roof, a window or door head, a portico ...  whatever.

 

 

 

The core of this family is an extrusion, constrained be various parameters and equality constraints.  The upper sweep has a “pick edge” path so that it turns the corner while responding to different roof pitches.  The lower sweep is horizontal, so it can be hosted on a reference plane. 

I started off simply, labeling the various parameters A,B,C,D,E so I could focus in getting the formulas to work.  We can clean up for later when it’s working properly and I can clarify my thoughts about which parameters to expose and choose suitable user-friendly names.

 

My profiles rely heavily on equalized reference planes.  It’s one way of reducing the number of parameters and formulas.  The results are not necessarily academically pure, but bear in mind that these are massing models, intended to facilitate rapid assembly of multiple buildings for comparative studies.

In the example below, the entire profile is driven by the “Depth” parameter. This can then be linked back to the "Width" parameter (A) in the host family.

 

 

That work was all done on Friday afternoon.  So, I was able to come back with fresh eyes the next morning and clean things up.  The result is a family driven by 3 instance parameters which set the Width, Depth and Pitch of the Pediment, plus 2 more to tweak the Depth of the Entablature and the relative size of the upper profile which sweeps around the eaves and the verge.

 

 

The final step is always to flex the family in the project environment to make sure it behaves as expected.  This actually happened before I finished setting up the two “Factors.”  So The flexing process revealed the need to have those adjustments.  A window head will have much chunkier mouldings in proportion to its width than the roof of a large building, for example. 

In the first place, these pediments will not be placed directly in project space.  I’m setting them up for nesting into generic families of Temples and Churches.  Of course, they could also be nested into door and window families for use in full-blown projects.  But first let’s use them to study some Roman Temples.  

Stay tuned.