I am studying the shells of Heinz Isler in one of my classes, in which I am to analyze his surfaces in a computational/parametric manner. Since most of his work was based upon his physical inverted membrane models, I am not sure of how to approach beginning to digitally model his work within grasshopper in an intelligent manner?
This requires an iterative approach, so is more of a scripting than a grasshopper challenge.
As Taz says, I am developing a tool which allows this and other physics based form finding methods within GH, but if you want to have a go yourself, then maybe start by looking at the work Axel Kilian did with Simon Greenwold's spring system - CADenary tool.html
The process itself is fairly simple, but requires a lot of work to implement. Essentially, you treat the fabric as a net of 1D springs with mass lumped at the nodes where they connect. Then you iteratively:
- Find the tension in each spring
- Calculate the resultant force at each node due to the tension in the attached springs
- From this force, find the resultant acceleration on the node
- Move all the nodes
- Repeat
The tricky thing is just organizing all this data so that you know what is connected to what. One of my old lecturers from university (she was a big Heinz Isler fan herself) wrote a book that goes into the mathematics of this in some depth, which I found useful when I was writing my own version of this: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=NNPJ3lpfBIIC&dq=tension+stru....
What about if I didn't necessarily need the definition to create 100% accurate in terms of physics, etc., just something that would behave in a similar manner using point attractors and a grid of points and such to simulate cloth and points where the cloth is fixed?