product design and fillets

Hi all, my first post here... I'm not (yet) a Grasshopper user, though I've used Rhino a little. I'm hoping to use it for a speculative project I have in mind.

I'd like to be able to generate iterations, variations, and "cross-breeds" of consumer electronics product designs, for example, telephones:

Or for example, to generate and populate control panels with parametric variations of knobs, dials, etc.:

I've been reading up a bit on procedural/generative modelling, shape grammars, etc. But the first basic problem I've run into, is that all the devices I'm interested in generating have filleted edges, and I've read that Grasshopper can't do that, because the FilletEdge command is not exposed in the SDK. I did read however that in Rhino 6, fillets will have history - so I wonder if that opens it up to Grasshopper at some point in the (hopefully not too far) future? Or is there some other approach that would help in generating these kind of forms in Grasshopper?

I guess most people doing this kind of generative modelling for CG/games would use Houdini or 3DS Max, but I want to be able to actually build some of these things with 3D printing/CNC, so I think I would be better off in the NURBS/solids world? I also looked at Solidworks/Inventor, which do very well with parametric fillets, but it seems like it would be difficult to get them to do the kind of generative stuff that Grasshopper can do, fooling around with Excel spreadsheets and formulas. Unless I missed some kind of Grasshopper-like plugin or scripting system for them?

Anyway, comments appreciated. I can imagine Grasshopper being quite useful for industrial design concept exploration, surprised that I haven't seen more of it...

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on November 14, 2014 at 2:24pm

There are quite a lot of differences between making geometry by hand in Rhino and making it through logic in Grasshopper. Both approaches tend to be good at very different kinds of geometry. Filleting is a specific example of a function that currently isn't available in Grasshopper (it probably will be in the future but that doesn't help you now). It is however more likely that the shape of a phone is simply unsuited for a GH approach. I do know whether it is, it sort of depends on how you define the shape.

If you can define the phone shape as the outcome of a (fairly limited) set of numeric constants, then you can generate lots of different versions of that shape, but looking at the pictures you posted, I'd hate to have to be the one to codify those geometries.

Permalink Reply by Nada Nix on November 17, 2014 at 7:13pm

Thanks for your answer David. I was looking at this, which was done in Grasshopper, using Genoform to generate the random variations in the parameters:

I wanted to do the same kind of thing with the telephone for example. But maybe I misunderstand how Grasshopper works. I don't have the Grasshopper definition for the above photo.

In Mode Lab's "Grasshopper Primer", it says:

"Back in 2008, David posed the question: “what if you could have more explicit control over this history?” and the precursor to Grasshopper, Explicit History, was born. This exposed the history tree to editing in detail and empowered the user to develop logical sequences beyond the existing capabilities of Rhino3D’s built in features."

I thought that meant you could model something in Rhino, and use Grasshopper to modify its parameters, tapping in to Rhino's history. Something like in this video, where a simple vase is modelled in Autodesk Inventor, and the Inventor version of Genoform is used to create variations of it by modulating some named dimensions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG6_2P4lkss

I read the whole Grasshopper Primer, and watched your introduction videos, but I'm still not clear as to whether Grasshopper can use or influence geometry modelled in Rhino. I see that you can reference points in Rhino. I know there's something called Geometry Pipeline, but I'm not clear on what it does.

From your answer, am I correct in understanding that the geometry must be modelled from the beginning inside Grasshopper? For example, the basic plastic bottle above has to be created using the circle, sweep, loft, etc. Grasshopper components, not the usual Rhino modelling techniques? In that case, it does seem like it might be rather tedious to model something like the telephone that way...

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