Modeling the Winton Guest House Part 3
Hi There,
Today, we continue with part 3 of modeling the Winton Guest House, where we will be looking at modeling the leaf building of the model.
Part 2 Recap
In Part 2, I modeled the long trailer-looking building together with its features. it didn’t follow the world plane, so I had to use the surface that I created to create the base profile. Not to mention I couldn’t extrude the shape because the two profiles have different orientations.
You can read more about part 2, here.
Learning Features of Part 3
- A pretty typical solid intersection workflow
- How to control arcs
Modeling
In previous parts of this model, we have only looked at directly generating the geometry for the different buildings. Specifically, when we see a building, we try to immediately generate the shape and then through some operations finalize the actual shape itself.
But with the leaf building, we have to take an indirect approach. We have to first build B-reps that represent our plan and elevation profile and then use a solid intersection to get our desired shape. Let’s see how we can do this.
1. Create Plan Profile
So, first off, we have to create our plan profile. To do this, we have to again select an edge from the central prism building and select a point.
Which roughly corresponds to the green cross in the picture below.
Then, just for more plane manipulation practice, I am going to draw a line that is perpendicular to the surface instead of following the plan drawing above. This is the green line in the image below.
To do this, I can select the face from the central b-rep, evaluate the surface and then use the normal of that plane to align a world XY Plane
Using the vectors of this new plane, I can create a point that is a certain distance away from the surface.
Then, I can use the SDL component to create a line which is the outer line of the plane profile.
Then, to get the inner line, I can connect the origin point of the plane with the endpoint of that central prism edge.
I can then create an arc between the inner and outer lines. To do this, I use the SED Arc component that will create an arc-blend. All I have to do is feed in the endpoints of the lines and a starting direction.
Because the arc sits flushed against the inner line, the starting direction for the arc is the direction of the inner line.
Then, I just close off the profile and join all the curves together into one closed curve.
2. Create Elevation Profile
Then we move on to creating the elevation profile. First, we start off by getting the endpoints of our outer line.
With those two points, we can build lines in the Z direction of a certain distance. This distance will be the height of our leaf building itself.
Then, like before, we can build an arc between the two lines. But this time, we don’t have an obvious starting direction. Therefore, I want to be able to control the severity of the arc. I can do this by creating a line and then rotating it.
Creating the parametric arc
First, I create a line that is in the Z direction from one of the endpoints.
The length here doesn’t matter as we are only using it for the direction. Then, I re-origin my surface plane to the endpoint and rotate my line by some angle on a slider.
Then I use the SED Arc component to create the arc blend and pass in this rotated line as the starting direction.
I can then change the severity of my arc by controlling how much I am rotating that line. All that is left is to then join all the curves and we have our elevation profile.
3. Run the solid intersection
Now with our two profiles done, I can extrude them and run the solid intersection to get our final leaf building.
I extrude the plan profile upwards and the elevation profile in the plane’s normal direction to get my two b-reps for the intersection.
But because it is a solid intersection, the B-reps that I am using must be closed. So, I cap them and use the Solid Intersection to get the final shape.
Final Thoughts
And that is it! By modeling the leaf building, we have completed the entire Winton Guest House model. And I hope you can appreciate the mental shift required to perform the solid intersection.
We no longer want to directly generate the geometry, we want to build the needed construction shapes to obtain our final shape.
If you have any questions at all about the modeling or the workflow, comment below or shoot me an email at bradenkoh@braden.com
But we aren’t done just quite yet. All this time, I haven’t been refactoring the script because I didn’t want to detract away from the actual modeling experience.
If you are following your instinct and experimenting with different geometric operations to get your end result, the last thing you want to worry about is how your script looks. So, I tend to either refactor portions of my script at a time or the entire script once I am happy with the result.
So, that will be the main topic for next week’s article and it will be the final part of the Winton Guest House model.
But for now,
I hope you have found this helpful and as always,
Thanks for reading,
I’ll see you in part 4.
Braden.
P.S. I would love to hear from you about the article or if you have any suggestions for future topics, leave a comment below or email me at bradenkoh@braden.com
Resources
The Youtube version of this Article:
Download the Grasshopper Script used in this article for free
(Just Set a Price of 0 dollars)
Read the Previous Article :
Originally published at https://allthingscomputational.substack.com on May 4, 2022.
