F I N I S H E D ! ! !

Hey guys, 

This will be my last post for the blog and my last assignment for this semester! I am finally finished! Yay! 

This semester has been a hectic one, consider that I am doing my final year project (gosh it's a pain in the ass!) simultaneously with this course. However, I really did this course because it is my life long interest to find out how things are made. The learning process is painful and difficult, but at the same time fulfilling and fruitful. I think I am starting to love GH for its endless possibility (especially for me, as I am a fan of curves!) and doubtlessly I will be using the knowledge throughout my design career!

Anyway, hope that everyone enjoyed the course as much as I did! Have a great holiday! =)

Samuel

Assignment 3 - Model Images

Model images!

Assignment 3 - Final Poster

Assignment 3 - Physical Model Construction

I was very psyched as this was my first time using laser cutter! The construction of the physical model was relatively successful, despite there were some unforeseen problem when it came to the actual construction of the model:

1. I didn’t take into consideration the physical property of the material I used. As I used 1mm white cardboard), the material was sometimes not strong enough and as a result many parts (especially the columns that goes through the bulging column in the northern apartment) was broken during construction. Lucky that I made quite a few spare duplicates or else it would be a nightmare to cut the parts!
2. While the notches fit very nicely together, the slots for the columns to go through in the bulging facade was not big enough for the columns to go through (many of them were crooked when I tried to squeeze them through the slots. I had to manually enlarge the slot in order to make that happened… and you can imagine how painful it was when there were 117 of them!!!
3. The notches that supports the floor slab are extremely tiny and I had to slot them into the notches using a tweezer and it was very repetitive. I should have designed the system to avoid that.

My laser cut sheets!

Floor slabs

notched columns and tiny parts for supporting floor slabs (they are only 5mm by 6mm!!)

 lost so many of these.... lucky I made spares!!

Tiny parts notched into columns

slotting the tiny parts into place... almost finished...

FINISHED!!

Lastly, I think the fabrication process was interesting and fulfilling and I feel the itch to mention a few things that everyone should consider when using laser cutter for modelling:

1. Think about fabrication when designing your algorithm and plan ahead.
2. When there are identical parts, make sure you make spare parts, as in most of the case manually cutting the parts will be extremely painful (if even possible).
3. Make sure you design a system that minimise the manual construction time, as normally it takes less time to design the algorithm then to manually construct the model (the tiny supporting parts took me 3 hours to slot them in the right place!).

Assignment 3 - Final Submission Images

Site Plans

Perspectives

 Elevations

East Elevation

 North Elevation

 South Elevation

 West Elevation

Reiteration Set 1 - Altering the curvature of the sculptural facade

Reiteration Set 2 - Altering the structural grid (which is related to the "waviness" of the facade)

Exploded axonometric of the apartment

Assignment 3 - Final GH Script and Laser Cutting Files

After simplifying the GH script by interlinking the relevant part together and deleting duplicated parts, the script now look a lot simpler as shown below.

As many parts of the script were interlinked, its became really difficult for me toexplain the script here in words. So I decided to write a brief description of each step in GH for easier cross referencing (so please refer to the GH script). I did the majority of the design in GH, but as time was limited for the submission, some parts of the mechanism for the facade (especially for the parts connecting the floor slabs with notches columns) were done in CAD. 

    

Also attached is the file (converted to jpg) that I used for laser cutting. I have deliberately made duplicates for the parts that were identical in case I screwed up the model, which I thought it was absolutely important as there would always be problems with physical modelling (you would be doomed if you screwed up the parts and you didnt have spare, which I found it was true in the later stage when I was constructing the physical model!!)

Assignment 3 - GH Experimentation 2

After chucking 3 all-nighters in a row, I finally finished the GH script that I needed for generating basic forms for laser cutting! The process was very painful, as my script consisted of 3 major parts that generated the overall form of the facade, namely the wavy facade (southern apartment), the sculptural facade (northern apartment - facing waterfront)and the bulging facade (northern apartment - facing cityscape). 

Rhino and GH screen capture

Overall perspective

 Overall perspective showing columns 

Overall perspective showing weaving floor slabs

 The Bulging Facade

The Sculptural Facade

Irregular placement of columns

I restructured the weaving algorithm in the previous experimentation by changing the division method and creating weaving edges by moving the points in Y-direction instead of offsetting them from the 3D loft, which allowed the weaving edges to align with the apartment existing levels, as in the elevation

The floors finally aligned!

In order to finish the script on time for my laser cutting submission, some of the parts were duplicated and data were manually entered to achieve the desired outcome. This resulted in the monstrously long GH script as seen in the screen captured image. 

Therefore a major cleaning up and simplifying of the GH script became a major task after the laser cutting submission. The script will be explained in the next post.