Geodesic dome

Hi all,

ok i don't know if my brain has gone into complete lockdown state or whats wrong with my, but i haven't got the faintest idea of how to create a geodesic dome in rhino and bring it into grasshopper or create it from scratch in grasshopper.

I need a sphere with points divided equally over its surface. Until now i've used a parametrization of the sphere but it just dawned on me that the points aren't equally distributed on the surface..

I'm leaning towards creating it in 3dsmax and exporting the vertices of it, and importing them in Grasshopper, but then i have no way of adjusting the number of points on the surface.

What to do? :)

Kind regards

Thomas

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Permalink Reply by Mårten Nettelbladt on May 19, 2009 at 4:04pm

I'm quoting from the little book 'Geodesic domes' by Borin van Loon:
"Any dome which is to be symmetrical must be developed from at least one of the platonic solids. [...] The method of truncation offers a second strategy but it is the third method which is the most useful of all. This is the method of subdivision or breakdown. The roundness of a shape can be improved by dividing the edges into shorter lengths and raising more points to the surface of the sphere."
I hope this can give you some clues. Regards. /Mårten

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Permalink Reply by Daniel Piker on May 19, 2009 at 4:23pm

Sounded fun, so I had a quick play:
geodesic.zip

Looking at it now, I realise you could probably get less variation in edge length by subdividing after projection, but its a start

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Permalink Reply by Thomas Bildsøe on May 21, 2009 at 2:13am

Btw, how can you be certain that the triangles will meet up. I don't know if im making my question clear :) but how do you make sure that when the triangles are rotated round the sphere, that they will meet?

/Thomas

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Permalink Reply by Mårten Nettelbladt on May 23, 2009 at 2:30pm

Some more info here.

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Permalink Reply by ZHANG Yan - popabczhang on October 12, 2009 at 10:57am

hello Daniel, the geodesic.zip file link are not working, and maybe you can share it with "dropbox".
getdropbox.com provide a quite good space for file share or even as picture and website server :)

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Permalink Reply by Daniel Piker on October 12, 2009 at 11:34am

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/2464688/geodesic.zip :)

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Permalink Reply by M on December 26, 2009 at 3:43am

hi
i've been trying to built a geodesic dome, i know all the theory, but i'm new to grasshopper.
so i'm trying to open this file you shared, but i can't open it. (should be the version i'm running) could you maybe post some screenshots of the definition, where i could just read the stuff?
thx

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Permalink Reply by Luis Fraguada on May 19, 2009 at 6:45pm

Dan, quite nice!

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Permalink Reply by Thomas Bildsøe on May 20, 2009 at 12:48am

Thanks for the answers both Mårten an Daniel.

Daniel, thats a great result. As luis said quite nice!!

/Thomas

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Permalink Reply by Arthur Mani on December 8, 2009 at 9:26am

Hi Guys,

Would you know any Free-Form geodesic structures ?
I have been looking at the "shortpath" command on rhino and tried what you see on the image but do you know any built example ?

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Permalink Reply by Jon Mirtschin on December 8, 2009 at 10:10am

Not sure if I'm adding much to this discussion as it seems that those with questions have come up with solutions. I missed this thread earlier this year, with regards to adding geodesic domes to Rhino, it's a command available in my Structural Drawing plug-in, refer : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfrljz-l8b0

As for the geodesics on a free form surface, that loks pretty impressive. I also did a blog post on mesh relaxation for a grid such as the British Museum Great Court Roof. I'm starting out working full time on these tools now, so hope to soon add a dynamic relaxation routine to the force density routines I show in this tutorial http://geometrygym.blogspot.com/2009/11/british-museum-great-court-... If the connectivity is correct with dynamic relaxation that should give you "geodesics" I believe.

Have you seen the Weald and Downland gridshell by BuroHappolds? I was lucky for a visit with work earlier this year. Google it for images.

Cheers,

Jon