Spaceframe from two surfaces, featuring parametric struts and nodes (Grasshopper)

Here's a solution for generating spaceframes from two surfaces. Struts and joints are real reactive components. As mentioned before, surfaces are first segmented by quad-mesh-faces, from which i derive lists of respective vertices. Since this is done for two surfaces, corresponding points on both of them can easily be connected with struts. For these, an additional script component had to be added, since there's no way i know of that can get me groupwise lofts from one large list of profiles. (And even if there was one, a tiny script definitely is the cleaner way, at least until david will come up with more advanced ways of dealing with data-streams).



Due to the topology of meshes, i get lots of redundant surfaces, which, because of their opposing orientation, can't be detected automatically. Also, some unecessary cross-wise struts show up. These issues could be addressed by skipping a strut where there is already another differently oriented one, which on the other hand leads to missing parts at the structure-boundaries. However, i might take care of that later.

http://rapidshare.com/files/205363664/spaceframe02.zip

Real Reactive Components (Grasshopper)

For anyone interested in real reactive components: here is a way this can be done in grasshopper with very little c# scripting involved:



The script-part segments a NURBS-patch into quad-mesh-faces, which are used to derive meaningful vertex-pointsets from:



As a very simple result, a pyramid-component whose corner-vertices sit on derived UV-points can be steered via attractors. the height of a pyramid depends on the distance of its base-barycenter to an attractor-point.

This kind of workflow implies some very interesting applications, which will be subject to successive posts.

http://rapidshare.com/files/204203764/RealReactiveComponent.zip