Friday 20 February 2009

Working effectively with geometry for Construction Projects

This is the first post (hopefully of many) that will provide tutorials, examples and provoke discussion for effectively generating, manipulating and assessing geometry for construction projects from stadia, to bridges, to buildings, to roofs, to anything else that is built.

It will primarily focus on using Rhino to effectively design construction projects, and explain how to take advantage of some tools I am developing, that utilise the amazing scultping and modelling environment within Rhino3d.  The plug-ins I am writing create efficient ways of drawing, generating and manipulating models representing structure, as well as exchanging the information back and forth with structural analysis packages.  I have set up a wiki for the plug-in, that can be found at http://ssi.wikidot.com 

I hope and encourage anyone reading these posts to contribute comments, suggestions, alternatives, and to request topics and tools for further development.  I'm expecting that the blog will cover all sorts of topics, from how to draw and model in Rhino, how to write your own RhinoScripts to Automate tasks, parametric modelling using Grasshopper, and we'll see what else. 

Cheers,

Jon

3 comments:

  1. Great to see the blog up and running. It will be interesting to read how your plugins develop nad how you use Rhino for scripting.

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  2. Hi,

    iam a structural engineer working in germany on membrane structures, your work is very interesting i will try them when i have some free time. We work with Autocad basically and rhino only for some special tasks that autocad can not do, but i think rhino can make the hole job and even more... Do you have a link where i can learn Grashopper.

    Thanks and cheers,
    sergio

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  3. Hi Sergio,

    Is there a particular analysis program used at your work? In the next couple of months, I'm hoping to get a basic version of the plug-in for a German program, but I haven't worked out which one yet. We've found Rhino can make many manipulations and generating of structural models much easier.

    I hope to add a grasshopper entry sometime soon, explaining some of the mini-gherkin model I created. There are lots of video tutorials on You-tube, and google "Grasshopper tutorial" comes up with lots of great pages. A useful starting point might by the primer created by LIFT Architects here : http://www.liftarchitects.com/journal/2009/1/22/the-grasshopper-primer.html

    Hope this helps,

    Jon

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