We’re continuing progress with Dassault Systèmes on implementing Catia into architectural process. Our first course of study aims at the Grasshopper/Catia workflow, and since our previous post, we’ve delved into Knowledgeware, the scripting platform for Catia.

Our conclusion: Knowledgeware is awesome. In our previous post, we were using Power Copy to create a generative model. While this process worked, there were a lot of manual steps involved, and updating geometry involved deleting all previous geometry and then reimporting. We’ve had similar issues with importing geometry to other applications, but Knowledgeware fixes these issues in Catia. By executing a Knowledge Pattern from an updated Excel file, Catia will update geometry which has changed, add new geometry, and delete old geometry no longer in the excel file. The ability to modify panels which have already been edited significantly improves the workflow and allows for flexibility. Also, Knowledgeware’s accessible API offers a lot of potential for having even more control over our data management.

Above is a basic demo for how the workflow is setup. We’ve recently taken a look at pedestrian bridge designs and put together a range of conceptual models demonstrating different bridge construction techniques.

Of the candidates, we’ve taken a particular interest in composite materials, which would be lighter weight, easier to install, and last significantly longer. Composite panels require close attention to joints and how they meet with other materials, so a program like Catia would be an ideal platform for evaluating the bridge for fabrication. While the sample video shows a preliminary sketch, by importing panels from Grasshopper, we can use Catia to apply a material to each panel. It would then be possible to evaluate the weight and structural integrity of the system from the program.

We’re looking forward to the next stage in the process, so stay tuned for more. Many thanks to Thomas Bergeron of Dassault for his willing help and expertise. Also, hats off to the TT Advanced Computational Modeling Group for developing TT Toolbox; the Excel writer is insanely fast.

The Kreysler shop is inspiring. They seem constantly busy and consistently happy taking on all kinds of projects and solving an array of problems with a diverse tool-kit with many different kinds of materials.  We were amazed to see their flexibility of thinking as well as the remarkable craftsmanship that’s required to produce the work they create.

We have been waiting for years to work with epoxies and fibers at a scale of the building industry, and we may just have a big opportunity or two around the corner.  It’s great to have a friend like Bill who goes out of his way to do some speculative collaboration; we have a lot of similar interests and beliefs in the possibilities of the tools and materials, and are eager to make something happen together in the future.

Now that we have our own 3-axis CNC mill we are thinking more and more about composites these days, and how we can use our tools to better understand the capacity and potentials of these construction systems.  Experiments are already in our heads and will soon be making their way to our mill and new layup station.  Stay tuned.

To top off our great week in SF, on our way back through town we stopped by to visit our friend Matt at PATH.  Matt is an amazingly talented designer and fabricator who is setting the bar for those of us who love designing and making.  Check out his stuff if you have a moment.  It will not disappoint.

We’ve continued our investigations into using Processing to create an interface for viewing a large number of iterations based on their parameters and performance metrics.  For the latest version, we set up a Grasshopper tower massing definition that can vary the tower form, floor to floor height, and percent glazing while also measuring extreme day heating and cooling loads (VIPER), and point in time illuminance (DIVA) on June 21st at 12pm.

This study is just a hypothetical test case, but it helped to point out a number of things that need attention.  First, adjusting the layout of all these graphics in the Processing sketch is a bit of a pain given that each project will likely have a different number of images and metrics.  This got us thinking about creating each of the graphics as it’s own object with an anchor or handles that allow the layout to be graphically adjusted within the viewer interface.  The current approach is to dynamically record the origin of each object to a MySQL database as the object is moved around the interface.  The last active value is then reused each time the sketch is relaunched.  This opens opportunities for others to interact with the Processing Sketch to set up their graphics without having know too much about Processing, but instead they’re simply composing a set of images.

It’s also important for us to record which iterations are desirable and which should be ignored. Nothing has been implemented yet, but this will likely become something like a 5 star rating or equivalent which will be written to a database that would also be accessible from Grasshopper.  It brings up the question of whether or not that rating should appear with the other metrics as part of the spider graph.

We recently discovered Paper.js which is being developed by Jürg Lehni & Jonathan Puckey.  One of the nice things about Paper.js vs Processing is that it’s built to allow user interaction at the object level which seems to be the direction we’re taking the Iteration Viewer.  We’ll let you know if that turns out to be the case.

Note:  This is part of a larger collaborative research effort that we are currently pursuing with the Advanced Computation Modeling Group at Thornton Tomasetti.  Stephen Van Dyck from LMN will be copresenting some of this research with Jonatan Schumacher on May 8th at the KA Connect Conference in San Francisco.

A common part of fabrication is labeling the parts to make assembling easier, but typical TrueType fonts generally aren’t ideal for fabrication.  After looking into them a little, we discovered that the it was because fonts need to be closed profiles and not just paths.  There are some pseudo single line fonts that can help minimize this problem, though there are often artifacts that may come through as missing or extra lines when Rhino drops part of the closed profile.

As an alternative, we used a script component in Grasshopper to convert strings into fairly simple curves.  Writing our own script rather than relying on a font also has the benefit of being able to control the letter height and spacing independently to make sure any bit size will leave the characters legible.

One of the cons with this approach is that because each character is explicitly created there is the chance that some needed characters are missing, though more could always be added as the need arises.  Also, it currently only creates upper case characters so any string gets converted to all upper case before the curves are generated.

Behold the Timplex font.

Splitting a mesh is often difficult when dealing with Sketchup geometries or Revit toposurfaces, and you may have heard us write about this earlier in our Contour Update post. This definition will work on continuous geometries which are also one-to-one functions (the geometry does not have holes and has a unique x,y value for every point on the mesh).  A site topography almost always fits these criteria, so this definition will help for trimming and splitting these meshes.

Here’s a quick run-through of the definition’s process:

• Select Mesh to split and select splitting curves.
• Triangulate Mesh
• Project naked edges of mesh onto the XY plane to create a planar surface.
• Project splitting curves onto the XY plane and split the planar surface. This isolates our regions, now we will recreate our meshes based on their containment within those regions.
• Test all mesh points for containment within each region.
• Project splitting curves onto triangulated mesh. This gives us a polyline for all curves since all mesh faces are planar. Test polyline points for containment as well.
• After testing these points for containment and grouping them based on each region, we can then recreate each mesh with Delaunay triangulation.

Download LMNts-meshSplit, 102.39 kB
Obligatory disclaimer: the author does not guarantee that these parametric models are bug-free or that they will solve all of your problems. If you find bugs or have suggestions for improvements, please let us know.

The Grasshopper plugin for Rhino has been a great addition to our design workflows in part because of the community that uses it and continues to make great plugins for it.  With that comes the headache of trying to standardize content across the office so that if one person works on a file, they can pass it on to someone else without having to figure out what plugins (and versions thereof) are used in the file.  Add to that user objects that we’re developing for the office and you see the kind of problem we’re running into.

After looking into a few different ways to handle this, we ended up creating a batch file to replicate content from a network location onto every computer with Grasshopper installed.  This script was implemented in two ways, as part of the Grasshopper installation process and as part of our company logon script.

For the installation process, we created a batch file that would install Grasshopper, the required C++ Redistributable, and then replicate the plugins and user objects.   Lines in the file that begin with ‘rem’ are comments so you can see what each command is really doing and provides some instruction on how to modify the file for use.   Even though we have the logon script running the same replication script, we decided to leave it in the install script in case someone installed Grasshopper and ran it immediately without logging off and back on.

Disclaimer: the author does not guarantee that this script will work or provide the best workflow for your office.  If you have any suggestions to improve it let us know.  The file is provided as a plain text file, to use it as a batch file rename it and change the file extension from .TXT to .BAT.

Minimum qualifications for the position include:

• Strong background and skill in visual composition and communication
• Expert knowledge of 3ds Max, V-Ray, Adobe Creative Suite
• Strong capabilities in image post-production
• Familiarity with Revit and Rhino
• Ability to understand and interpret architectural drawings
• Enthusiasm for design communication through visualization
• Ability to multi-task and strong organizational skills
• Willing to relocate to Seattle, WA if not already residing in the area

Strongly preferred qualifications include:

• Teaching experience, particularly regarding visual composition
• Familiarity with Grasshopper
• Experience or interest in interactive graphics and programming
• Experience producing 3d animations, videography and motion graphics

LMN is an award winning firm of architects, interior designers and urban designers dedicated to working collectively to bring the highest quality of design, program resolution and technical quality to a wide range of project types.

Interested candidates meeting the minimum qualifications should send a .pdf of their resume and portfolio sample (less than 8 mb) to lmnemployment@lmnarchitects.com.

We recently checked out the MSAFluids library for Processing, a fluid simulation engine based on Navier-Stokes equations. This is modeled off of Jos Stam’s algorithms which are used for gaming and animations. Not physically accurate, but visually awesome.

We edited the java library to add interior collisions to the Processing script. This allowed us to import building footprints to the canvas in order to see how fluids would interact with different shapes. We did this by selecting a planar-section in Grasshopper, pixelating its regions, and exporting those regions to Processing through Excel.

Now it’s important to note that these results are neither scalable nor predictable. While we can vary the speed of the fluids tested, we’re not quantifying velocities (and fluid behaves differently at varying speeds). And though the fluids are based on Navier-Stokes equations, they neglect the physical accuracy required for CFD studies (for more info, read Jos Stam’s paper here).

This experiment instead serves as a visual benchmarking exercise, proving to us that the MSAFluid library is lightning fast. With each loop, it’s easily tackling thousands of fluid particles which are collision tested with thousands of pixels. This is promising for future simulations given that Processing is the best tool we have for testing models with high-particle counts.  In the future, we’re looking to apply Processing to other high-particle simulations, like acoustical raytracing.

We’ve started exploring ways of casting some of the pieces that we previously showed in the post on Acoustic Reflection Patterns and thought we’d share what’s been done so far.  The diffusive panels break down into individual units which we’re thinking of as bricks.  We’ve cast some objects (1,2) in the past which required a fair bit of time to prepare the molds and we were hoping to produce these molds more quickly.  We also wanted the molds to be constructed from multiple pieces so we could easily disassemble the formwork without damaging the part or needing to have draft angles.  Our recent experiences(1,2) cutting ACM led us to a solution which we were able to layout and fabricate in less than an hour.

The faceted form of the brick made it possible to treat the mold as a piece of origami that is unfolded with connection tabs added.  The scores for folding the ACM were kept on the outside of the part so that all of the interior surfaces would remain crisp at the transitions between facets.  We’re currently casting the bricks as solids but we’re looking to make them lighter either by creating a foam plug for the back or doing something with rotational molding.  We’ll post more when that happens.

We learned today that we won three awards in the 2013 A+ Architizer Awards; a Jury Award for Modeling, and the Popular Choice Awards for Modeling and Fabrication.  We’d like to thank all of you that voted for the UISOM Suspended Theatroacoustic System. We’ll be posting more about this project in the future.  In the meantime, checkout the latest acoustic reflection simulations we’ve been developing.