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After playing with the PanelingTools plug-in for Rhino4, I noticed its great power for mapping components on a surface efficiently. The one restraint that it has is its inability to map multiple components through conditional statements. The great thing about PanelingTools is that it allows you to access its syntax tree in RhinoScript. After gaining access to its mapping/ordering technique, I wrote a script to populate multiple surfaces with multiple components/panels. The script chooses which component is more appropriate by analyzing a point, surface, or light displacement map. This allows for performance based populations and surface mimicking populations.
Inspired by SJET and theverymany.net ‘s Tesselion.
Utilizing Rhino + PanelingTools + RhinoScript, four base components were modeled and tagged into the script according to their porosity. A “driver surface” ( that could be a height field of a heat dissipation map of the target surface) dictates which component to populate depending on the zed of the corresponding grid point of surface. Further exploration and development is coming.
One thing that should be understood is that this experiment does not clearly match the level of complexity achieved by SJET and theverymany.net!! The surface I used to populate was not a rulled surface nor a faceted surface; therefore, the individual panels are not planar as in the Tesselion. Although it is a nice feature of PanelingTools to “morph” the components to the surface grids, it is not desired for fabricating out of planar materials economically! Script will be posted after cleanup.
Very quick exploration:
