ange’ for its 2016 cycle, as a starting point to investigate principles of natural formation processes and interpret them as innovative architectonic spaces. These concepts are carefully interwoven with spatial, performance-based, and structural criteria in order to create full-scale working prototypes.
The three-week long programme is formulated as a two-phase process. During the two-week initial phase, participants benefit from the unique atmosphere and facilities of AA’s London home. The second phase, lasting for a week, shifts to AA’s woodland site in Hooke Park and revolves around the robotic fabrication and assembly of a full-scale architectural intervention.
Prominent Features of the programme:
• Teaching team: Participants engage in an active learning environment where the large tutor to student ratio (5:1) allows for personalized tutorials and debates.
• Facilities: AA Digital Prototyping Lab (DPL) offers laser cutting, CNC milling, and 3d printing facilities. The facilities at AA Hooke Park allow for the fabrication of one-to-one scale prototypes with a 3-axis CNC router, various woodworking power tools, and robotic fabrication.
• Computational skills: The toolset of Summer DLAB includes but is not limited to Rhinoceros, Processing, Grasshopper, and various analysis tools.
• Theoretical understanding: The dissemination of fundamental design techniques and relevant critical thinking methodologies through theoretical sessions and seminars forms one of the major goals of Summer DLAB.
• Professional awareness: Participants ranging from 2nd year students to PhD candidates and full-time professionals experience a highly-focused collaborative educational model which promotes research-based design and making.
• Robotic Fabrication: According to the specific agenda of each year, scaled working models are produced via advanced digital machining tools, followed by the fabrication of a one-to-one scale prototype with the Kuka KR150 robot.
• Lecture series: Taking advantage of its unique location, London, Summer DLAB creates a vibrant atmosphere with its intense lecture programme.
Eligibility: The workshop is open to architecture and design students and professionals worldwide.
Accreditation: Participants receive the AA Visiting School Certificate with the completion of the Programme.
Applications: The AA Visiting School requires a fee of £1900 per participant, which includes a £60 Visiting Membership fee. A deposit of £381 is required when registering with the online form. The deadline for applications is 11 July 2016. No portfolio or CV is required. Online application link:
https://www.aaschool.ac.uk/STUDY/ONLINEAPPLICATION/visitingApplication.php?schoolID=392
Return train tickets between London-Hooke Park, accommodation & food in Hooke Park, and materials from Digital Prototyping Lab (DPL) are included in the fees.
For inquiries, please contact:
elif.erdine@aaschool.ac.uk (Programme Director)
alexandros.kallegias@aaschool.ac.uk (Programme Director)
…
URBS cup surface, and boy oh boy did it ever work more uniformly than using 3D orb cutters on a 3D cup. Different sized spheres return the *same* hex grid only less and less raised up as the spheres get very large.
My first question is whether these are different in character or just in Z scaling, so if I rescale them all to the same Z thickness, after extracting only the relief structure via Boolean union and splitting...and they are only *slightly* different in character, which means mere Z re-scaling of a single moderate ball size relief is an appropriate cheat to avoid slow Boolean union re-making each relief Z scale with different sized balls.
The one on the right is a very shallow relief scaled up to the same Z thickness as the pure sphere one on the left. And really, we will be mostly scaling *down* from a thicker master surface so that will attenuate any weirdness in the curvature. Indeed, I see no difference, so it makes sense to only archive the thickest one so we can control the full range of thicknesses, all the way to nearly flat bulbs. Here is the thickest one, just before the balls lose holes between them, scaled down compared to a shallow one made with huge balls to start with:
Now we just use Rhino Flow Along Surface or the Grasshopper Jackalope plug-in Sporf to morph this flat system onto our lathe form.
With Rhino history for the Flow Along Surface step I can rescale the original in Z and wait twenty seconds to see the update:
There are sad edge artifacts that will require some strategy to retain or later delete a whole row:
Maybe add more geometry to later delete or make a solid to hold stuff together?
So vastly decreasing the cell count and changing grid direction to match your cup:
The edges came out fine on this one, happily. The isocurve count has been increased by the Flow Along Surface command:
It can't be filleted yet since the joint where the cup NURBS surface has a joint now leaves feathery edges, so I went back and duplicated the border of the flat array, offset and lofted to make a protecting surface:
But that gave crazy artifacts:
I'm just going to use symmetry to fill in the joint with good faces that are not having to be joined as two halves. I had to turn my Rhino units tolerance down from a silly 0.0001 to 0.01 units to get a good re-join, but it still won't fillet without leaving holes.
SO LET'S FILLET THE FLAT THING. Same problem but a bit faster, and actually repairable manually. Rhino 5 is buggy as hell with core commands, damn it. This is not world class behavior.
Let's try it in Rhino 6 WIP, our great hope of the future: nope, the same. I had to simply manually copy the missing pieces from where it did work, which at least is easy to do in flatland. Now I get a cup:
This can *all* be done quickly in Rhino without Grasshopper, and Rhino affords you fast cage editing of the original flat array that Grasshopper cannot yet do. You just need to use Analyze Direction to be able to swap UV directions of the source or target and flip the source surface to achieve concave vs. convex patterns.
Grasshopper doesn't even have a fillet (multiple) edges component so there's not a lot of advantage to having some super slow parametric system via Grasshopper. It's not like you'll be able to see the changes fast enough to tweak a design.…
This is the actual reason I'm going through all this. I want to develop an algorithm that can be applied consistently and produce good results.
Here is a a little background. I'm working on my master's thesis in structural analysis. My thesis is on seismic behaviour of a roman temple in Portugal. I will be using a method of analysis suitable for block structures called the discrete element method. I am using a commercial code called 3DEC for this.
Now in order to the analysis I need to construct a 3D block model of my structure. I received a 3D scan of the entire structure (in *.wrl) format and spent a week trying to clean it up and slice it into the blocks that make up the structure. Now I want to use the scanned geometry of the blocks and describe a simplified prism around each that will represent the block in my analysis. I've attached a file with one of the columns in the temple. I think (at least with my tests so far) that it is representative of the all the blocks I'm dealing with.
Now my criteria for creation of the blocks:
I would like the contact area between the blocks to be as close as possible to the actual drum contact area,
I would like to get the volume of the blocks to be as close as possible (secondary to the contact area) to the volume of the actual drums in order to insure that the weight distribution in the structure is as close to reality as possible,
I would like the shape of the contact area to be as close to reality as possible
I order to satisfy all these requirements, I've done the following in my grasshopper file:
I take a section at the top and bottom of each of the drum meshes. I use this to extract the contact outline at the top and bottom of the drum. This is sometimes problematic and requires me to clean up the model and remove features that interfere.
Next I take each surface and try to fit a minimum circle around it. I try to do this because in my mind this is the best possible way to find the actual centre of the drum when there is cut outs and deterioration. This works well as long as more than half of the contact surface is still in its circular shape (third block from bottom in the example file doesn't satisfy this requirement and thus causes problems).
Knowing the centre, I use an algorithm I created in VB to search for one of the flutes on the contact profile. My ideas is that if I can find one of the flutes, I can then find the others by just going around at 30 degrees (there are 12 flutes) and find the location of all the flutes. In the VB code I've tried to explain my algorithm so I won't explain it here. I also think this algorithm is needlessly complicated and stupid as I'll explain later.
Once I've got one of the flutes, I just find the intersection of a line with at every 30 degrees with the outline curve.
Having all (12) points around the perimeter, I use an loop to scale the shape around the centre of the circle I found in step 1 to get the area within a tolerance value of the actual contact area (satisfying requirement 1). I was using HoopSnake before, but it required resetting every time so I decided to write my own thing.
I then connect the points on both top and bottom to get a solid block.
Now the problems are as follows:
Sometimes the algorithm doesn't find the best location as the starting point. As I said an important thing is that the circle is tangent to the flutes and that is true only if the column profile is larger than a half-circle.
The software I use requires convex blocks. I've tried to remedy this by using convex hull component before step 5 to insure the surfaces are convex.
I'm having issues sometimes with the alignment of top and bottom points. I think I just need to implement a component that sorts the points around a single basis so that there is no twisting.
I've been experimenting with convex hull as a general approach for defining the corner points, but I'm having problem take the convex hull curve and breaking it into a 12 sided polygon, preserving as much as possible the location of the flutes and the general shape of the contact surface.
I'm really sorry about the long post and complicated question. I hope someone can give some pointers on what I could try. I understand that this is not an easy question and that it is more a question of doing something rather than asking about grasshopper itself. My goal is to have an algorithm that I can explain as a general method for others to use in the future when dealing with these structures. This is only a small minor part of my thesis (the analysis is what is important) but it is taking a lot of time to figure out.
If you have any other questions, I would be more than happy to provide a better explanation. In the file I have created a region with all my input parameters. You can choose a different mesh from that point and change various settings. I hope that is self-explanatory.
Thanks for all your help,
Ali
BTW: I'm really sorry for the poor way I've done this stuff so far. I'm not a programmer and apart from some small macros in Excel I don't know much about this stuff. To add to that, I've just started with Rhino and Grasshopper about five days ago after almost pulling out all my hair trying to do this with AutoCAD!…
nts for Ladybug too. They are based on PVWatts v1 online calculator, supporting crystalline silicon fixed tilt photovoltaics.
You can download them from here, or use the Update Ladbybug component instead. If you take the first option, after downloading check if .ghuser files are blocked (right click -> "Properties" and select "Unblock").
You can download the example files from here.
Video tutorials will follow in the coming period.
In the very essence these components help you answer the question: "How much energy can my roof, building facade, solar parking... generate if I would populate them with PV panels"?
They allow definition of different types of losses (snow, age, shading...) which may affect your PV system:
And can find its optimal tilt and orientation:
Or analyse its performance, energy value, consumption, emissions...
By Djordje Spasic and Jason Sensibaugh, with invaluable support of Dr. Frank Vignola, Dr. Jason M. Keith, Paul Gilman, Chris Mackey, Mostapha Sadeghipour Roudsari, Niraj Palsule, Joseph Cunningham and Christopher Weiss.
Thank you for reading, and hope you will enjoy using the components!
EDIT: From march 27 2017, Ladybug Photovoltaics components support thin-film modules as well.
References:
1) System losses:
PVWatts v5 Manual, Dobos, NREL, 2014
2) Sun postion equations by Michalsky (1988):
SAM Photovoltaic Model Technical Reference, Gilman, NREL, 2014
edited by Jason Sensibaugh
3) Angle of incidence for fixed arrays:
PVWatts Version 1 Technical Reference, Dobos, NREL, 2013
4) Plane-of-Array diffuse irradiance by Perez 1990 algorithm:
PVPMC Sandia National Laboratories
SAM Photovoltaic Model Technical Reference, Gilman, NREL, 2014
5) Sandia PV Array Performance Module Cover:
PVWatts Version 1 Technical Reference, Dobos, NREL, 2013
6) Sandia Thermal Model, Module Temperature and Cell Temperature Models:
Photovoltaic Array Performance Model, King, Boys, Kratochvill, Sandia National Laboratories, 2004
7) CEC Module Model: Maximum power voltage and Maximum power current from:
Exact analytical solutions of the parameters of real solar cells using Lambert W-function, Jain, Kapoor, Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells, V81 2004, P269–277
8) PVFORM version 3.3 adapted Module and Inverter Models:
PVWatts Version 1 Technical Reference, Dobos, NREL, 2013
9) Sunpath diagram shading:
Using sun path charts to estimate the effects of shading on PV arrays, Frank Vignola, University of Oregon, 2004
Instruction manual for the Solar Pathfinder, Solar Pathfinder TM, 2008
10) Tilt and orientation factor:
Application for Purchased Systems Oregon Department of Energy
solmetric.com
11) Photovoltaics performance metrics:
Solar PV system performance assessment guideline, Honda, Lechner, Raju, Tolich, Mokri, San Jose state university, 2012
CACHE Modules on Energy in the Curriculum Solar Energy, Keith, Palsule, Mississippi State University
Inventory of Carbon & Energy (ICE) Version 2.0, Hammond, Jones, SERT University of Bath, 2011
The Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI) of Photovoltaics: Methodology and Comparisons with Fossil Fuel Life Cycles, Raugei, Fullana-i-Palmer, Fthenakis, Elsevier Vol 45, Jun 2012
12) Calculating albedo: Metenorm 6 Handbook part II: Theory, Meteotest 2007
13) Magnetic declination:
Geomag 0.9.2015, Christopher Weiss…
occur more than once in the same list, and different elements with identical values can occur more than once. Also, a list may contain lack of elements, referred to as "nulls".
Sets. Strictly speaking a Set is a mathematical construct which adheres to a strict collection of rules and limitations. Basically, a Set is the same as a List, with the exception that it cannot contain the same element more than once, or indeed two or more different elements with the same values. You see, in mathematics there is no difference between a value and an instance of that value, they are the same thing. In programming however it is possible to store the number 7 in more than one spot in the RAM. Grasshopper does not enforce this rule very strongly though, you can use a lot of Set components on lists that have multiple occurrences of the same value. The big difference between Lists and Sets in Grasshopper is that Sets are only defined for simple data types that have trivial equality comparisons. Basically: booleans, integers, numbers, complex numbers, strings, points, vectors, colours and intervals. Lists can contain all kinds of data.
Strings. Strings are text. There's nothing more to it. I don't know why early programmers chose to call them strings, but I suppose it's a better description of the memory representation of them. Strings are essentially sequences of individual characters.
Trees. Trees are the way all data is stored in Grasshopper. Even when you only have a single item, it will still be stored in a tree. A tree is a sorted collection of lists, where each list is identified by a path. A specific path can only occur once in a tree, when you merge two trees together, lists with identical paths are appended to each other. Trees are an attempt to losslessly represent not just the data itself, but also the history of that data. Imagine you have 4 curves {A,B,C,D} and you divide each into 3 points {X,Y,Z}. Then, for each of those points you create a new line segment {X',Y',Z'} and then divide each of those line segments again into 5 points each {K,L,M,N,O}. The way data is stored in trees, it should be possible to figure out whether a point M belongs to X' or to Z', and whether that X' or Z' came from A, B, C or D. This is why paths are often quite long after a while, because they encode a lot of history.
Paths. A Path is nothing more than a list of integers. It's denoted using curly brackets and semi-colons: {A;B;...;Z}. A Path should never be empty {} or have negative integers {0;-1}, but it is certainly possible to create a path like this and it probably won't even crash Grasshopper. Paths are 'grown' by components that (potentially) create more than one output value for a single input value. For example Divide Curve. It creates N points for every single input curve. In cases like this a new integer is appended to the end of the path.
In the next release the Path logic in Grasshopper is somewhat different. I fixed a number of obscure bugs (hopefully without introducing new fresh bugs) and special cased certain operations to somewhat reduce the speed at which paths grow. This may well break files that rely on a specific tree layout, but I hope the temporary sacrifice will be worth the long-term benefits.
--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia…
option, after downloading check if .ghuser files are blocked (right click -> "Properties" and select "Unblock"). Then paste them in File->Special Folders->User Object Folder. You can download the example files from here. They act in similar way, Ladybug Photovoltaics components do: we pick a surface, and get an answer to a question: "How much thermal energy, for a certain number of persons can my roof, building facade... generate if I would populate them with Solar Water Heating collectors"? This information can then be used to cover domestic hot water, space heating or space cooling loads:
Components enable setting specific details of the system, or using simplified ones. They cover analysis of domestic hot water load, final performance of the SWH system, its embodied energy, energy value, consumption, emissions... And finding optimal system and storage size. By Dr. Chengchu Yan and Djordje Spasic, with invaluable support of Dr. Willian Beckman, Dr. Jason M. Keith, Jeff Maguire, Nicolas DiOrio, Niraj Palsule, Sargon George Ishaya and Craig Christensen. Hope you will enjoy using the components! References: 1) Calculation of delivered energy: Solar Engineering of Thermal Processes, John Wiley and Sons, J. Duffie, W. Beckman, 4th ed., 2013. Technical Manual for the SAM Solar Water Heating Model, NREL, N. DiOrio, C. Christensen, J. Burch, A. Dobos, 2014. A simplified method for optimal design of solar water heating systems based on life-cycle energy analysis, Renewable Energy journal, Yan, Wang, Ma, Shi, Vol 74, Feb 2015
2) Domestic hot water load: Modeling patterns of hot water use in households, Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Lutz, Liu, McMahon, Dunham, Shown, McGrue; Nov 1996. ASHRAE 2003 Applications Handbook (SI), Chapter 49, Service water heating
3) Mains water temperature Residential alternative calculation method reference manual, California energy commission, June 2013. Development of an Energy Savings Benchmark for All Residential End-Uses, NREL, August 2004. Solar water heating project analysis chapter, Minister of Natural Resources Canada, 2004.
4) Pipe diameters and pump power: Planning & Installing Solar Thermal Systems, Earthscan, 2nd edition
5) Sun postion and POA irradiance, the same as for Ladybug Photovoltaics (Michalsky (1988), diffuse irradiance by Perez (1990), ground reflected irradiance by Liu, Jordan (1963))
6) Optimal system and storage tank size: A simplified method for optimal design of solar water heating systems based on life-cycle energy analysis, Renewable Energy journal, Yan, Wang, Ma, Shi, Vol 74, Feb 2015.…
a and we'll stop adding new stuff. At this point the Grasshopper version will be rolled to 1.0 Beta 1 and we'll keep on fixing serious bugs, resulting in Grasshopper 1.0 Beta 2 etc. etc. until the product is stable enough to be treated as a commercially viable product.
This does not mean Grasshopper will no longer be free. Robert McNeel & Associates (who develop and own the copyrights to Grasshopper) haven't decided yet whether or not to sell Grasshopper or whether to keep it as a free plug-in for Rhino customers.
As soon as Grasshopper 1.0 goes into beta, all development (apart from the odd bug-fix) stops and we start typing on Grasshopper 2.0. It will probably be a few months until the first 2.0 WIP version is released but basically the whole process starts over.
What are we looking to accomplish for 1.0 and which things are planned for 2.0 and beyond? The only major feature still missing in 1.0 is the Remote Control Panel. This feature was removed at some point and has been partially rewritten since then. Once it's finished, we consider the 1.0 feature set to be complete.
To be honest we've made very few concrete plans yet concerning 2.0, however it's clear that some things need to be at least seriously considered and researched. Here follows a list in no particular order:
Documentation System. This is one of the things we know we're going to do as we've already started. The Grasshopper help system will need to be rewritten and a lot of help topics need to be typed up. We have a pretty good idea what it is we want to accomplish with the new help and how we're going to go about it.
Vocabulary. Along with new documentation we'll critically analyse the current terminology and vocabulary of Grasshopper. We'll probably come up with glossaries and style sheets. We want to use words that are —at best— self documenting and —at worst— non ambiguous.
SDK and core library cleanup/improvement. Grasshopper was the first large scale product I ever developed and a lot of mistakes were made in the SDK design. A lot of functions and classes have been marked obsolete over time and many operations are not properly bottlenecked. I also want to add a lot more events so it's easier for code to keep close tabs on what's going on at any given moment.
GUI platform. At the moment Grasshopper is pure .NET winforms using GDI+ for all the interface drawing. There are certain performance issues with using large GDI+ surfaces and certain limitations on what we can and cannot draw. We will be investigating other graphics pipelines such as WPF, OpenGL, DirectX, OpenTK and whatever else seems promising.
Multi-threading. It is clear that some components are embarrassingly parallel, and since almost every single laptop and desktop has at least 4 cores these days it would be a shame not to use them. We will investigate what it takes to implement multi-threading as a standard feature.
Large file support. Grasshopper becomes awkward to use when a document contains more than a hundred or so components. We need to both improve the interface to provide methods for layering or grouping sub-algorithms and also add ways to reduce memory and computational overhead.
--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia…
stributes structural supports for a uniformly loaded domain using e.g. the internal energy of the loaded domain as fitness. Here the uniformly loaded domain is represented by the trimmed surface. My genomes are the support positions (green crosses), which are restricted to a set of predefined grid points. I’m currently using an (i,j)-coordinate indexing for these grid points (illustrated in the viewport just below) as opposed to a sequential , “one-dimensional” numbering (illustrated in the viewport further down).
(i,j)-indexing systemAltenative, sequential indexing system
The support positions are computed by two gene pools; one governing the i-index, Gene List {i}, and one governing the j-index, Gene List {j}, of each support. The value of slider 0 in Gene List {i} is paired with the value of slider 0 in Gene List {j} etc. and the amount of sliders corresponds to the amount of supports. The screen shot below depicts the slider constellation corresponding to the support distribution depicted above. Unfortunately the j-index represented in the sliders needs remapping as the number of j-indices vary for each i-index (horizontal row of grid points). With the current setup I have 12^6 x 9^6 = 1,6 x 10^12 different genomes. If I were to use the sequential, “one-dimensional” numbering, I would only use one gene pool with sliders ranging from 0 to 76 meaning that remapping could be avoided and thereby having only 76^6 = 1,9 x 10^11 different genomes.
So, my current genome setup causes a bunch of issues related to the Evolutionary Solver: Remapping Changing one of the j-index sliders, will not necessarily change the related support position but it will still facilitate another genome to be calculated by the solver. (This problem could be eliminated by using the sequential, “one-dimensional” numbering)
Switching slider values around If the values of e.g. slider 0 were to be switched around with the values of slider 5, this again would yield a new genome but an identical solution. (This problem cannot be eliminated by using the sequential, “one-dimensional” numbering)
Coincident support positions Two or more supports may be located in the same position. (This problem cannot be eliminated by using the sequential, “one-dimensional” numbering)
I find it impossible to imagine the fictive “fitness landscape” of this problem and not only because of the multidimensional genome characteristic but just as much because of these listed, intertwined peculiarities. I’ve tried running the Simulated Annealing Solver as well, but my experience is that the Evolutionary Solver yields better results. To my awareness, the solver uses some kind of topographical proximity searcher. This is why, I think that the solving process itself benefits more from analysing the (i,j)-index system, in which neighbouring grid points hold more uniform topographical information than the sequential, “one-dimensional” numbering, which might have big ID-numbering gaps between neighbours. Have I understood this correctly?
Cheers…
ack to .ghx?
This is in relation to a discussion I've been having with David Rutten & Scott Davidson about GH consuming memory in a relatively large GH definition (~. I think what I've learned from this is that one should limit the size of the GH file, or put some incremental stops in the definition to limit the length of calculations that it runs at once. Is this a valid conclusion?
The GH file we're talking about is 7Mb & the Rhino file is about 120Mb, but when working w/ the GH def. I try to only keep about 2 curves turned on.
Here's a summary of the discussion:
Hi Mike,thanks for sending it over. I've been fiddling with the file for about 10 minutes and it climbed from 1.7 GB to 1.9GB, but then I've been switching previews on which means more meshes get calculated so you'd expect a higher memory consumption. It is possible we're leaking memory, but if you're working for hours on end, memory fragmentation might also explain part of the increase. Basically, memory gets fragmented just like disks get fragmented after prolonged use, difference is that memory cannot be defragmented unless you restart the application and allow it to start with a clean slate. I'll try and find any leaks we may have missed in the past.Goodwill,David
──────────── David Rutten
On 09/03/2011 06:19, Mike Calvino wrote:
Thanks very much David for the quick response. I've attached the files zipped. I can't figure out what's doing it. After working in the file for awhile, the memory usage in the Windows Task Manager climbs . . . it's gotten to 1.57+Gb before I exited GH & Rhino5Wip & let it dissipate, then restart & work for awhile before it does it again. It probably takes like 4 or 5 hours before it gets that high. That's the highest it's gotten, & that only happened while I was working in a Rhino file that had all of the elements baked into it - turned off at least, but it still climbed to 1.57+Gb. It seems to climbs when you work in the file & move around in both the GH def. & the Rhino file. Like turn on a few of the Extr components at the right end of the "StandareRibExtuder" groups, you can watch the MemUsage go up, but when you turn them off, it does not go down. - goes up fast at this point. Maybe I need to figure out how to do the definition with fewer components, I'm sure that's part of it, but I must confess, I think I'm still early on in the learning curve.I really hope that this is not operator error on my part & I do apologize up front if it is. I have done a disk cleanup, I have tried excluding .3dm & .ghx files from my NOD32 antivirus, no change. I hope you can find something.Let me know if you have any trouble with the files.See if you find anything & please let me know . . . thanks!Cheers! --Mike CalvinoCalvino Architecture Studio, inc.www.calvinodesign.com
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