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
