GRASSHOPPER SKYSCRAPER
Tuesday, August 11, 2009 ;)
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DOWNLOAD: GH DEFINITION, RHINO MODEL
Top two images-perspective renderings; Middle image-Site Plan; Bottom image-formal studies with grasshopper model. Rendering done by exporting Grasshopper file to sketchup, exporting images, and postediting with photoshop.
The Grasshopper skyscraper was developed for a competition that I participated in spanning the last couple of weeks. My partner and I were designing a high-rise that would sit near downtown Shanghai, China. An early concept was to create vertical gardens climbing the tower which would bring badly needed green space to a very dense city fabric. I began building a Grasshopper model that could do two things: generate random sloping surfaces and allow for a lot of parametric control. The final definition solved both issues pretty successfully. The vertical gardens were given rolling landscape by inserting a range of heights that could be altered to provide steep slopes, or very little sloping. Ultimately, we decided on less sloping to allow for more habitable space. Almost every aspect of the tower can be parametrically controlled such as floor heights, number of floors, floor slab thickness, degrees of rotation, location of towers, and footprint geometry. These all were crucial to the development of the towers as we began looking at program, as square footage. Also, the tower was to take on characteristics of surrounding context such as bridge piers and rotating highways adjacent to the site. The Grasshopper definition allowed us to apply these formal concepts to our final design with ease and adjustability.
Reader Comments (18)
hey this is a great design, do you mind posting a sreen image of the definition? or if its possible. perhaps share the definition?
thank you in advance.
Good day Alex, my name is Kevin and I have just completed my degree in Design Architecture here in Newcastle Australia. Your "SKYGARDEN SKYSCRAPER" has caught my attention as a really ECO FRIENDLY building. I use ArchiCAD as my main design platform however, I have just purchased Rhino 4.0 and have Grasshopper as a plug-in. I would like to challenge myself by designing a skyscraper similar to your SKYGARDEN project yet the set up is extremely complex. My question is---do you have examples of the GRASSHOPPER set-up or very similar so that I may attempt a design along the line of your building. I am not trying to copy however, for many years I wished I could create a building as organic as yours but did not know how. Now that I have the tools to do so I would like to give it a go.
I have looked at a lot of sites regarding Rhino and Grasshopper and have tutorial video'a that can show me SOME aspects but these are not exact as to what I wish to achieve.
I look forward to your reply. Kind regards Kev
Hi Kevin,
I have posted the Rhino model and the Grasshopper definition about half way down the post. I have many different iterations of the definition, but I am pretty sure I have posted the same one as in the video. Hope this helps and good luck
Hi Alex, I find your sketchup to photoshop daytime illustration of your skyscraper quite beautiful as a quick alternative. I use rhino for most of my 3D modeling and i'm curious if you have any recommendations for clean ways to export rhino models into sketchup so I can try your technique out for myself. From what I understand, exporting rhino models generally create triangulated meshes which can clutter an illustration using your daytime tutorial. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks and awesome work btw!
Hey Aaron,
You will get a ton of triangulation when importing into sketchup from Rhino. However, once in sketchup, you can highlight surfaces, right click, and choose "soften smooth edges." Play around with the slider and you will eventually get rid of the triangulation and get the nice clean surfaces that your looking for.
Hi alex,
I just started learning gh and I wanna ask you where did you learn gh and how. Also if you have some good tutorials or website I ll appreciate it.
Thanks
The Grasshopper website has a ton of info such as the Primer by Andy Payne and many other in-depth documents. Also check out DesignReform.net . Other than that, just find definitions online so that you can dissect them and learn from them.
I have followed your grasshopper definition and everything works however I am getting an error on the last 2 peices of the definition which is the loft and I am not sure why. I didn't change the definition at all and just set the points and curves
hey alex....have to say awesome work...had a question...the second image (the blak and white 1 ) ..in wht program is it rendered in ?...rhino ?...and what is the material given to the surrounding blocks ..
.thanx a lot :)
Amazing work Alex..... I was tring to download the GH Definition, but all I got was a Screen full of text (XML). It did not work as easy as the Rhino download, can anybody please give me some advice to download the file.
Nevermind guys I figured out what the problem was. I was using Internet Explorer, but once I tried downloading it with FireFox, it worked perfectly Fine....thanks
Thats interesting. Im glad you figured that out. Others have had the same problems. I will have them try other browsers now. Thanks
To answer Saurabh's question, no rendering program was used. It is just me playing around with a mixture of Sketchup exports overlayed on one another in Photoshop. The is a step-by-step walk through in the tutorial section of the site.
Hello alex! my name is Sungbum, from KOREA. I found your site on the google, and I was very surprised by your works and renderings. It's really beautiful i think.
Actually i have a question about Rhino. I saw your sky scraper designed by Rhino, and you said "Rendering done by exporting Grasshopper file to sketchup". I tried to export Rhino files to sketchup, but it caused problem with lots of mesh lines. So how did you erase so many mesh lines in sketchup? or my question is "how did you export Rhino files to sketchup without generate mesh lines?"
I really wanna know that.^^ because whenever i wanted to render Rhino models into wire frames by Make2D, It took very long time to render. Sometimes it took almost 2hours, i think. U know, actully sketchup took very short time rendering into wire frame. So, if you possible to answer my question, please e-mail me. Thank U.^^
Hi, i have the same problem as Sungburn expressed, exporting the model to sketchup freezing my computer too. [it's i3-6gbram-hd5650]. I thought i have too much details or objects in my grasshopper definition thus the model. What is your solution to problems like this? Is there a more efficient way of exporting things to sketchup?
Further Notes: In my case : i made a parametric mass housing project consisting of 1200 flats over an entire 50k metersuare area. Even if i decrease all the flats to mere boxes , sketchup could not hold that 1200 cube. Pretty frustrating.
I have tried to draw the whole model in to the +,+ [at the coordinate system] side to decrease the file size and complexity too. Think about that i'm that desperate about this subject.
@Sungbum,
You will never be able to export a rhino model to sketchup without converting everything to a mesh. The reason why is because Sketchup does not have NURBS capabilities, it only models as a mesh. However, to get red of the triangulation in Sketchup, just select all of the surfaces, right click and choose "Soften smooth edges". This will remove most if not all of the extra linework.
@ M. Deniz,
There could be a lot of reasons why you are having trouble. What are you exporting from Rhino as? I always exported as a .3ds file and really lowered the polygon count when that dialogue box came up. Then import the 3ds file into Sketchup and see if that works better.
hi
it is very nice from u to post the definitions of the gh it rally helped me out thank you very much
i am architect and i just wanna to know where else i can find a gh definitions for architecture projects like towers museums plazas bla bla
can u help me on that coz i am doing my graduation project a parametric tower and every little thing will help
thank you very much again
hi alex i create a new model in skp and then i want to import into gh to modify. but there is a question that the model surfaces create triangulated meshes and strange lines.so i want to ask how i can clean up these line and triangle?