Michael A. Rodriguez, Project 1: Surface Population

 

Concept:

Above I have attached an image that was my concept for the surface population project. I happened across this image and it's simplicity really convinced me to try and recreate this image with the basics of grasshopper and surface population techniques. Simply put, the object is a sphere with tube like barnacles on the outside, both of which were basic shapes I knew I could easily produce in rhino. I began this project with the goal of reproducing a spherical barnacle, or at least a ball with holes in it. 

  Process:

The Process was something I just needed to keep rather simple; as I knew that manipulating the Rhino Grasshopper software would give me trouble and even a couple of errors the first time I attempted to run it. I started out with a basic sphere, followed by producing a tube. Next, I connected the sphere to the surface command block and the tube to the populator command block. After this process, all that was left to do was to bake the object into a new layer. One thing I would leave as a note to myself would be to decrease the amount of tubes I had set to populate the surface area, as well as decrease their overall size. the creation of my populated object put quite a strain on my computer and resulted in me crashing the program and losing a lot of progress the first couple of tries. Remember to save your work kids.

Materials:

With the end result turning out to relatively resemble the concept image, I was satisfied with the modelling and software usage of grasshopper. Using the renderer built into rhino, I applied a red mulch texture to the sphere, and further edited the render later by applying a plastic deep red to the tubes to get the resemblance to the concept image a little bit closer. The only difficulty here was making the realization that baking the object allowed me to texture the tubes and the sphere differently if I wanted to. without this knowledge, I would have had to to stick with the first render in the image with the orthographic display. However, I liked the outcome in the second rendered image that much more and decided to take a bit of extra time to get it where I wanted it.