CUBE RIG BLUES

I had a great time 3 weeks ago on Vasari Talk with Zach Kron & Lilli Smith from Autodesk.  You can watch the session on youtube if you missed it.  Follow the link here : Spring Onion.  Also, if you want to download the "square onion" file that I was playing with towards the end of the session you can find it here :  Repeater File.

During the discussions, Zach noted that most of my vegetables were based on the idea of a scalable rectangle, & asked if I had tried using a scalable cube.  My answer was basically that I like to keep things simple, hence the focus on a 2d rig.  But since then I have begun to explore the idea of a cube, just to see if there is any potential there which can be exploited without getting too deep into the realms of complexity.

So my first trial scales up by typing in a length value & has factors for varying the proportions of the cuboid (relation of height & width to length)  The first think that came to mind for this was to host a 3 point adaptive component into it as a repeater.  So I made up a simple prototype roof truss.

This worked out fine.  You can adjust the cube parameters so that you type in a length and width, then use a height factor to control the roof pitch.  Probably with a bit of trigonometry revision I could get it to respond to an angle parameter.

This was promising enough to encourage me to flesh out the truss some more.  Looks OK.  Very easy to parametise the repeater number so you can specify the number of trusses.  Again this could be reverse engineered to let you type in a spacing and have Revit work out the number of trusses.

Also it's very easy to control the position of the ridge line so as to create assymetrical trusses.  So I think this is definitely one valid use for the cube rig. 

You can work up different types of 3 point adaptive also to vary the truss style (King Post, Queen Post, Fink etc)  Easy enough to extend the rafters to create an eaves overhang also.  Would be interesting to push this a bit further and create the framing for more complex roofs using this approach.

But this time around I left it there and went on to explore using the cube rig for other types of scalable shape.  This series of explorations was less successful (in my view)  I started off by placing a couple of 3 point adaptive components, just triangles made with model lines.  Select these and create form.  Play around with the size and proportions of different instances

Next I tried dividing up the cube into slices, much the same way as I place horizontals in my rectangular rigs.  Then I used these to host splines, again much like the spring onion, or the sweet potato, etc.  These splines can then be used to define a surface. 

You can adjust the surface manually by nudging points around, then when you get something you like, loat it into a project and scale it up and down.  Also vary the proportions of the bounding box.  No idea what this might be though.

To create a solid form, I made the 3 splines into repeaters and hosted a 3 point adaptive component.  Select all these and create form.  I played around for a while with these, hoping that something interesting would shape up, but mostly I just ended up with wierd shapes that can be scaled up and pushed & pulled into different proportions.

Probably some ideas for exploiting this idea will come to me later on, but at the moment I am not greatly impressed so I decided to change the rules slightly.  The next set of explorations was more interesting & I will share them in a separate post.  For the moment here's a little teaser,

 

PINK PANTHEON

Two posts back I imagined 4 different scenarios in which we might decide to specify a Corinthian column, how that might affect the procurement process & therefore the way we would document that element

Scenario 1 envisaged a lightweight "placeholder" family, backed up by a specification that calls for a "design & manufacture" specialist.  So I decided to take a crack at making this family & went on to try it out in context.  The context then took on a life of its own & became the Pantheon (Rome not Paris)

The capital is a blend plus an extrusion. The important thing for scalability is to have one parameter that controls the size of all the others.  I chose the Radius at the base of the capital, because this could then be linked to the Radius at the top of the shaft.

Simple formulae were used to link all the other parameters back to this Radius.  In elevations views, the solid elements are switched off and replaced by a masking region plus symbolic lines.  I tried to keep the number of lines down to a minimum that could fool the brain into saying "Corinthian Capital".

Testing out the column in context took me to the Pantheon.  I'm feeling fairly good about this. 

Then to try out the scalability, there are some internal niches with much smaller columns.  Had some strange behaviour where the niche family flipped to the wrong side of the wall. 

This is where I started to get carried away.  I remembered Zach's coffer dome from way back, so I had to have a go at this.  Actually the top part of the dome is smooth, (which was easy to do) and the coffers are all eccentric to compensate for perspective (left that for another day)

I couldn't resist going for an internal render, which meant working up just enough internal detail to catch the atmosphere.  A couple of stock RPC people provide a sense of scale.

I haven't shown an internal section view yet, because this requires manual scaling of the 2d lines.  Can't see any way around that at present.  If you export them to CAD and reimport, there is a scale factor but I don't think it's possible to parameterise this. 

The other shortcoming is that 2d only works when the family is square on to the view, and obviously not all the internal columns are going to be at right angles because they follow the curve of the circle.  You can see the effect in the section.  Only one column is showing the symbolic capital and the manual scaling is slightly out of date ... doesn't quite match the 3D.

The external elevations are coming on nicely, but once again the base moulding has to be scaled manually for different column sizes at present.  I'm guessing that Paul Aubin has progressed much further than me on this. 

I experimented with the idea of enhancing the capitals in image processing software, but this is a bit tedious really, only had the patience for two.  This was all done before I had developed the "new leaf"  capital I described in my last post.  So I will get around to incorporating an improved version of that into the Pantheon one of these days. 

To close I have a double image.  On the left is a reminder of the subtle delicacy of the original, which has survived many centuries of abuse.  On the right is my clumsy attempt to make a scalable capital using old-school Revit extrusions.  Pretty awful.  I thought it might be possible to make something that looked almost as good as the 2d symbolic and so avoid the manual scaling.  Wishful thinking.

 

A NEW LEAF

I've got quite a nice thing going with Paul Aubin here, motivating each other to think more deeply about what we are doing & to extend our modelling horizons.  On the face of it, the topic is classical orders, & more specifically Corinthian Capitals, but as Paul has noted it takes us into various topics of very general application such as appropriate "Level of Detail"  (also called Level of Development or LOD)

In my previous post, I imagined a number of different scenarios that might suggest rather different approaches to these issues, depending on what you wanted to achieve & the method of procurement (eg "off the shelve components" versus "project specific design & install by approved specialist")  Paul has taken a slightly different approach. basically setting himself a very demanding modelling challenge and seeing how close he can get.  It's a work in progress but the results to date are impressive to say the least

The work I want to show in this post was inspired by Paul's efforts and was mostly done just before the Pumpkin Competition.  It was in fact my first attempt at a "scalable rectangular rig" and helped to give me the confidence to tackle a scalable vegetable collection.

So I had recently watched Paul's video clip and having recovered from the initial shock, suddenly got the idea that a 2 dimensional rig could be used to create a leaf.  I made it adaptive so that it could be repeated around a cylindrical form.

I decided to keep the profile simple also, for the initial "proof of concept" stage at least.  So it's a triangle with flattened ends, which was easy to set up parametrically.

I made 3 different types, and hosted 4 instances on to the spline.  The "mid" type is used twice.  The sizes of these 3 profiles are linked to parameters in the host file so that you end up which can be made broader or narrower after you load it.  So there are triangular profiles, nested into a leaf, which is nested into a corinthian capital, and from the capital file you can adjust the size of those triangles to control the proportions of the leaves.

Within the capital file, the adaptive leaf components are hung onto a cylinder which has height and radius parameters.  This gives me a circular array of 8 leaves with the controls I need.

Double up the ring and you are well on your way to a Corinthian Capital.

Before I set about the scrolls at the corners, I needed an abacus to push them up against.  I conceptualised this as an extrusion with a sweep running around the edge and set about making a scalable rig for the sketch defining the extrusion.  This worked out fine as shown above.

If you look over my previous post you will note that the proportions of corinthian capitals can vary quite a bit.  This is quite easy to do with the controls I built into the leaf family.  At this stage I compared my capital with the photos and decided that I had the S curve of the leaf wrong.  Not that there is an absolute "right" & "wrong" here, but I wanted to capture the  way that most of the leave in my photos went up straighter and curled out more at the top.

This just meant opening up the leaf family and adjusting the spline.  Enough of that.  Time to tackle the spiral scrolls.  Once more I turned to a rectangular rig.  This time it's a square with a cross, and then a union jack in the top right corner.

Draw a spline and host a few rectangular profiles along it.  Create form & play with the sizes & proportions of these rectangles.  Watch out for self-intersecting geometry.  The first attempt is going to be too open and rather uneven, but you can zoom in there and nudge each point around to close up the gaps.

There may well be better ways to make these scrolls, but this one is quite interesting and I managed to tighten up the gaps quite nicely.  Then it was just a matter of linking all the profile sizes back to parameters and controlling these by formulas containing "X"  (where X & Y are the sides of the whole rig)  Now the whole thing will scale up and down by typing in a new X value.  Good enough

So I plugged in 16 copies of the scroll (8 big & 8 small) and decided to call it a day.  Each of the elements that make up the capital is separately scalable, but as yet I can't scale the whole thing up and down with a single click.  Also it is still a somewhat stylised and simplified version.  Currently it is standing at almost 6mb.  Not disastrous, but you things might slow down a bit if you had a couple of hundred of them (think Colloseum)

This was all done almost 6 weeks ago, just before I launched myself into the vegetable kingdom.  You can expect an update shortly, and keep an eye on Paul's blog also to see how his version develops.

http://paulaubin.com/