Recently I’ve tutored a Processing workshop for the Hyperbody department at the TU Delft. I’ve decided to share the sketches with the open world – who knows, maybe someone will find them useful. There’s quite a few variations included – clustering, attractors, collision avoidance, etc. Read below for the download link and some screens of some of the sketches.

2d and 3d clustering:

Swarms interacting:

Attractors and structures:

Collision avoidance:

Here’s a .zip file containing everything – including some Grasshopper sketches which allow for some basic interchange between Rhino and Processing via standard text files.

Here’s a movie of the thing in action (realtime):

Importing geometry (lines) from Rhino+GH into Processing, then switching back. Springs are rendered via a nifty hack, ie inverse proportional to the tension inside them. This corresponds to the most cluttered areas where particles get together more. The attraction force is good ‘ol newton’s law.

Of course, you can use it in 2d as well for any number of geometrical network relaxation uses you may find it useful for (street networks, for one, infrastructure at a more abstract scale, city planning, fancy urbanism projects, the like).

For the more architecturally inclined, here’s what happens when gravity enters the mix:

Nice, isn’t it? A nifty form-finding algorithm for a fancy support system of, well, any surface you please (I used a rectangle in example, a bit dull, but aren’t you fed up of double curvatures?). Here’s some screen grabs:

The structures presented here are self-normalizing, ie they reach an equilibrium at some point in the system. However, this is achieved via a delicate balance of quite a few parameters in the processing sketch: path resolution, spring strength and damping, world physics damping & min distance for the attraction force. I strongly recommend taking a look at traer’s physics lib documentation before starting to juggle the values (and to know where to look to juggle the values).

Enjoy & share alike!

Definition file (.ghx).

Referenced assembly (.dll).

Please note that the referenced assembly is based entirely on code from luvtechno.net.

We started out on this by analyzing the area and its surroundings from the point of view of circulation (more on how we did this). How would people move around? The conclusions from this study where integrated later on in the project.

Next we took on the task of (re)creating the landscape – modify the terrain in a functional yet unobtrusive way. Formal concepts revolved around radiolaria, foam, water, waves etc. Luckily we had a working circle packing applet in processing ready (which was used for this). From here on, it was quite straightforward: expand the circles to smooth spherical caps and smartly transform them into urban furniture.

The interstitial space that remained between the”bubbles” is packed with wood alongside the routes we discovered to be ideal using the circulation study. The rest is English lawn pure green smartly-cut grass.

This project is a collaboration between Veronica and me.

Tools we used include:
Processing was VERY important early on in the design process – we used it for the circulation study as well as for the early circle packing experiments (size, density, spread etc).

Rhino and RhinoScript: RhinoScript is great – we used it extensively (create spherical caps based on the generating circle’s radius, expand circles, contract circles, import circles which the processing applet generated, etc.). Rhino was used for everything else – 3D modelling and, of course, making valid STL files for the 3D printer and also exporting the right things for the laser printer.

Laser cutting was done here (as always).

3D wax models were kindly made for us by mazarom (at the moment the only 3D printing service in Bucharest). If you need a complicated model, don’t hesitate to contact them!

Plotting the final presentation was done at studio spot. They don’t have a webiste…

Using processing to make a circulation study in a public area. It’s for the current school project. More details later.

I’ve used Shiffman‘s boids sketch as a start, and gradually started building up with some attractors, Point Obstacles (which are attractors with negative pull basically), and Linear Obstacles (which were a little bit tricky, but this helped out a lot). Also very inspirational were kokkugia‘s experiments.

When it’s nice and propper, I will  add some details and upload the code/sketch.