Populated Shells – Grasshopper L.1

“Populated Shells” is a 3-day(24-hour) Grasshopper marathon workshop, dealing with the implementation of basic growth and subdivision strategies from biological systems in architectural design. Using the 2011 ITKE Research Pavilion, by Achim Menges and Jan Knippers as reference, we are aiming towards the design analysis of a cellular pavilion. During the course of this class, you’ll learn and comprehend the fundamentals of visual programming with Grasshopper3d, and move quickly from simple data structure management to complex generative modelling, concluding with a design case study, aspiring to be fabricated on the final day, with our in-house cnc laser cutter.

Recognised as an official introductory course, all trainees receive an Official McNeel Grasshopper level 1 Certificate upon completion.

This 3 days event is designed for everyone who is interested in gaining basic computational design skills, with a focus on working with cellular models. During these days, you will be introduced to process-oriented design, you will gain access to a wide range of form-finding tools and techniques and you will learn ways of preparing your designs for prototyping and fabrication.

Course Outline

In this training course you will learn to create and edit grasshopper definitions and get acquainted with parametric modeling. This fast-moving class deals with most of Grasshopper’s functionality, ranging from curve editing and data-tree manipulations to logical gates.

The duration of the course is 24 hours. The course is intensive and spans two consecutive days of design training (10:00 to 19:00, with a 1 hour lunch-break at 15:00) and a final day, oriented towards the design and fabrication of our target project.

Each trainee receives the official courseware as part of attending this course.

Structure

In this class, you will systematically move through the user interface, command access, creation and editing of curves, surfaces and solids, through computational methods. Information will be presented at an accelerated pace.

Expected Outcomes

After this course students are expected to be able to:

* Create parametric models

* Understand algorithmic design principles

* Utilise basic parametric tools, such as attractors and morphing

* Produce custom grasshopper definitions, according to their design intent

* Prepare 3d models for fabrication with 3d-printing and cnc cutting technologies

Curriculum

At decode™ we believe effective training needs an intriguing goal instead of generic exercises. Most of the tutorials will be presented as part of a design process, in which we will be doing structural analysis and redesigning well-acclaimed architectural projects, as well as creating new objects from scratch. In this way each student will be guided through the process of completing a set of challenging and interesting design projects, leading up to the final design goal.

During the 20-hour course, the following concepts will be covered:

* Acquaintance with the Grasshopper3d interface

* Various ways of data input and output of Grasshopper

* Operators

* Analysis of geometry and parameter extraction

* Data trees and lists management

* Boolean operations and conditionals

* Basic functions for the dynamic generation and manipulation of geometry

* Transformations, population and morphing

* Pattern generation

* Attractors & Vector fields

* Triangulation algorithms

* Recursive modelling

Pre-requisites

Requires Windows skills and desire to create. Previous rhino3d modeling experience is deemed greatly helpful but not required. A general understanding of basic mathematical principles is also considered helpful, but an explanatory lecture will be given where needed.

All participants are required to have:

*Their personal laptop with them. Additional NUC computers can be provided after timely communication.

*Rhinoceros3d V5.0 pre-installed. You can download a 90-days evaluation version from http://www.rhino3d.com/download

*Grasshopper 3d (latest version) pre-installed. You can download the plugin for free from http://www.grasshopper3d.com/page/download-1

*Lots of patience and positive thinking, learning is fun after all!