Baldino,
I liked your box-morphing tutorial, and plan to go back and do the
rest of them. The workshop is probably 60-90 minutes, with about 1/4
devoted to a parametric modelling intro, and the other 3/4 for live
tutorial. And I'm asking the Rhino teacher to have the interested
students install Grasshopper in his session so I know they will come
prepared, and possibly have had a week to play with it on their own.

David,
I was thinking of a straircase, since that is something students have
to model on practically every project. I hadn't tried doing one yet
myself. I can't tell how hard your example is without stepping through
it, and since I'm currently covered in thinset mortar from a house
project, I'll have to try that later when I'm cleaned up.

All of this info is very useful info in any case, whether or not I can
get it into this 1-day format, because if the interest level builds
then I want to do more in depth in upcoming semesters. The only real
obstacle is to continually build the interest level - I'm at a
somewhat tech-conservative architecture school (I only know 2 others
using Grasshopper here).

-Chris



On Jan 18, 11:00 am, David Rutten <[email protected]> wrote:
> My most complex demo involves a stair case which extends itself to
> nearly touch a freeform wall. I might not be very suitable for a
> workshop though. I found that workshop examples need to be as basic as
> possible if you want people to understand them and elaborate on them.
>
> Just for good measure, here's the progression of the freeform
> staircase:
>
> 1) Create, in Rhino, a freeform curve which will act as backbone for
> the staircase. It's usually best to keep the curve flat on the world
> xy-plane, and elevate each successive step by a fixed amount (this is
> how stairs work), but you can also use a 3D spline directly.
>
> 2) Create, in Rhino, a freeform surface next to the stair curve, one
> which guarantees intersections. Usually a vertical deformable Plane
> works well (you can control-point-edit the plane to create some
> bulges).
>
> 3) Ok, switch to Grasshopper. First import the curve and the plane
> using a Curve and Surface parameter respectively.
>
> 4) Then use the HorizontalFrames component to generate a bunch of
> frames along the curve.
>
> 4b) If you're using a flat input curve, then generate a set of
> increasing vector and move the planes upwards.
>
> 5) Extract the plane Y axis, and generate a set of line segments
> starting at the plane origin and pointing along the y axis (Line SDL
> is best for this), you can pick a longer length value to make it clear
> how the lines look.
>
> 6) Now intersect the line segments with the wall surface. This is
> where you need to make sure the wall is big enough to intersect ALL
> lines. If you use the mathematical intersection instead of the
> Geometrical, the length of the lines doesn't matter.
>
> 7) Now, you should have a series of intersection points on the wall
> (one for each curve frame), so you can measure the distance from the
> Curve frame centres to those intersection points.
>
> 8) The last step involves using a Box component to build boxes on your
> surface frames, where the width of set boxes is related to the
> distance of the intersection.
>
> Anything more complicated than this and people don't stand a chance of
> actually grasping what's going on. In fact, you could argue this is
> already over the top.
>
> --------------------------------
>
> The things I typically talk about first are:
>
> Parameters: what do they do, how does data flow, how can you examine
> what's inside (i.e. tooltips, menus, Post-it panels)
> Data: What types of data do we have and how can we set those? Numbers
> and Booleans are easy enough, but what about points? or curves?
> Components: first, the anatomy. Components have input and output
> parameters, and these behave a lot like the free floating ones. Then
> components also have the black-box in the centre. Show how context
> menus change depending on where you click inside a component.
>
> This would be an excellent point for some assignments, maybe ask
> people to elaborate on the examples you've used so far in the lecture.
>
> Once you feel it's time to explain some more, talk a bit about Lists.
> Components like Series, Range, Random but also CurveDivide etc. all
> generate lists of outputs. How do we deal with these? How is data
> combined and what can you do if it's combined in the wrong way (i.e.
> list sorting, culling, shifting, inverting etc.)    Finally, maybe a
> word on Data matching (Shortest List, Longest List and Cross
> Reference)
>
> If people are really smart and you're ahead of schedule, maybe, just
> maybe, you can talk about expressions. Don't scare them with cosines
> or factorials, just show how you can make a network a lot cleaner by
> adding the odd "N + 1" or "Min(N, 50)" inside some parameters.
>
> --
> David Rutten
> [email protected]
> Robert McNeel & Associates
>
> On Jan 18, 3:54 pm, Chris Wilkins <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
>
> > Hi,
> > My professor has asked me to do a Grasshopper workshop, and I'm trying
> > to come up with examples that are both simple to understand, and
> > useful for students in architecture studio. The audience is 2nd year
> > architecture undergrads who have shown proficiency in Rhino (all 2nd
> > Yrs do a series of Rhino workshops here).
>
> > Here is one example of simple and useful, which just makes a handrails
> > and balusters from a 
> > curve:http://groups.google.com/group/grasshopper3d/web/StairRailings.jpg
>
> > Since theres an abundance of brains on this forum, I figure you guys
> > might have some good suggestions for "simple and useful" definitions.
> > Any ideas?
>
> > Thanks,
> > Chris
> > Clemson University- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

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