Jackson Lanphere week 4 surface population

Concept:

I set out to create this project, with no clear goal in mind. I wanted to create a sporadic, and spontaneous object, by manipulating basic shapes in rhino. I also used this project in an attempt to teach myself more of the ins and outs of rhino, without turning to a guide every five seconds when something unexpected would inevitably occur. In short, I started with the goal to learn through trial and error, and I feel I have become a bit more comfortable with the program through this endeavor.

Process:

 

 

 

The process for creating this design was simple, but was met with the challenge of learning rhino. I started by creating a truncated pyramid with seven edges on it's bases, a shape that I thought would be simple, but later learned that this would not be the case. From there I used the transform tools to manipulate the shape until I felt happy with it. I then exploded the object, and deleted the top and bottom base as I felt they were getting in the way. From there I built a simple population object from the ground up by extruding a square and then offsetting the surface by a value of one. I followed the same steps with a series of "s" shaped curves that I would later scrap as it was too messy of a design to understand once they were used as population objects.

 Next I loaded up Grasshopper and followed a tutorial I had used during the second week to learn surface population. This gave me some issues, as the tutorial is only for a single surface with a single population object. Once I realized this, I made the best of what I had, by creating four separate population codes, linked to four separate objects, that all apply to one surface. Here's a screenshot from grasshopper.

 

 

I would then bake the final morph of the four population objects, and clear the values for the surface and select a new one, until I had created the entire object. Clearly this is not the most efficient way of creating a populated surface, so I simplified this back to one object and one surface, and scrapped the "s" shaped curves, opting for a more is less approach the second time, with my final object.

 

Rendering and Materials:

Once I had a completed populated object, I felt that this design resembled a jungle gym with the square shape I used for the population object. I then assigned different colored metallic surfaces to each of the sides of my object. The result however, was less than satisfactory, with the colors clipping together in a strange way. I then switched all the materials to plaster, and the clipping issue was gone. I'm fairly certain this is an issue with my computer and not rhino, as I don't have the best computer as far as graphics are concerned. 

 Overall, I am happy with how much I learned through this project and am eager to learn more on the next.