Grasshopper Level 2 workshop with simplyrhino

I finally found time (and felt as ready as I’ll ever be) to attend the Level 2 workshop in Grasshopper at Goldsmiths Centre in London.  Three days of stuffing my brain and trying to keep up with Arthur Mamou-Mani as he rattled through some amazing demos and then kept announcing, “OK your turn”.

This time the class was made up exclusively of architects, some from Denmark, Italy and an Australian (landscape architect) guy working in London.  And myself.  So I’m grateful to Arthur for skewing some of the content towards the prettier and smaller objects I’m interested in designing.  Although we did model a few building structures on the way.

To begin with we mainly covered trees and advanced tree logic, before moving on to Kangaroo, Ecotect and Weaverbird.  For me, the most exciting part was modelling a sheet of paper with score lines, and applying spring forces to the paper so that it started to fold or unfold itself in real time, depending on the input forces.  It truly is an amazing sight to see something on your screen behaving like a real physical object, which you can control in real time.

One other highlight for me was using the Galapagos solver to orient hexagonal roof panels optimally towards the sun.  Lofting said roof panels when the solver was nowhere near finishing produced some very interesting “pyrite” like structures, which will look amazing when 3D printed in a metal.

So on the whole, what a fantastic course and it just showed me how little I still know about Grasshopper…  Apart from some basic pattern generation, I’ve really barely scratched the surface so far.  There is much to learn!!