IDS2012 Toronto

Over the past few months, I’ve been collaborating with Mani Mani of Fishtnk on a chair for the Interior Design Show (IDS) in Toronto. The show is next week, and the chair is finished – come check it out!

Ghosts On Top Of My Head

A small but fun project I was recently involved with. Designed by Brian Jungen:

 

SPM VC: Small But Important Update

We’ve just uploaded a small but important update to the component set. Basically, the major reworking of the components in the last update messed with the actual integration functions – this has been fixed. More specifically, we’ve settled on a leapfrog integrator for a force based simulation and the RK4 integrator, with a fast option, for regular integration.

In general, we are shifting our focus away from adding new functionality (check out the dynamics source code – you can write your own!) towards optimizing performance. This release is a first step in that direction. Also, some updated example files have been added – more to come.

Check out the new Distance Binning component. At only %30 speed increase, it’s still a WIP.

SPM Vector Components: New Release!

This release features a major reworking of the component set. Yes, we managed to break all functionality during the refactoring; No, we couldn’t figure out how to fix it for a quite while…..In the end, it all came together, though. The biggest change is that we combined the Static and Dynamic Integrators into one. This means you can toggle between the two modes on the fly. Beware, though, if you leave the timer enabled and switch to the static integration, you’ll rebuild the solution at every time step (i.e. crash)!

We have also decided to release our code for the dynamics. This means that if you adhere to structure, you can build your own dynamics.

Other developments:

• Acceleration component has been removed. By default, the simulation assumes all vectors are forces. This can be toggled in the settings if you simply want to integrate.
• The settings component has been broken out into three components and a few menu options.
• Inter-particle forces have been added. This is meant more as a prototype for future developments (flocking has been done many times before…more on this later). These dynamics are SLOW!
• Dynamic Emitters! These are really fun…

New Dynamics:

 

 

 

 

 

Surface Attraction: Turns any list of surfaces into gravity attractors or repellers.

 

 

 

 

Surface Flow: When particles are close, they flow along any list of surfaces.

 

 

 

 

Separation: Assign a distance to be maintained between particles within a given radius.

 

 

 

 

Cohesion: Particles will tend towards the average of their neighbours.

 

 

 

 

Alignment: Particles will tend towards travelling in the same direction as their neighbours.

 

 

 

 

Dynamic Keyframe: Give collections of dynamics time intervals to be activated.

ACADIA 2011

Michael Braund, Chris Walsh, and I just presented a paper at this year’s iteration of ACADIA, a conference focusing on digital tools and techniques in architecture. Our submission was a paper featuring a human- space interaction analysis tool called, for lack of a better or even relevant name, “Dragonfly”. I will be posting some videos and hopefully a live demo over the next few days. We received some great feedback (mainly urging us to differentiate ourselves from existing tools and to do more testing), and we will certainly take those suggestions to heart.

Some of the outstanding papers for me were Achim Menges and company’s work with wood, Maciej Kaczynski’s (et al) work with digital fabrication (i.e. Robots!) of thin masonry vaults, Skyler Tibbits’ work on large-scale self-assembly, and of course Mark Foster Gage’s keynote talk telling us all to shut up about computation. Actually, I think he was telling Patrick Schumacher to shut up about computation….but perhaps it goes for the rest of us as well.

Emitters and Sprites

Although using the vector display with a gradient significantly decreases the performance of GH (video has been sped up 1.5x), it looks great!

I only wish I could customize the sprites, or at least make mesh vertices transparent….

AiC Archeology: Sept 8th @ 6pm

Martin Cooper, partner and senior archeologist at ASI, has been involved with many heritage buildings such as Osgoode Hall, Castle Loma Stables, and the Old Don Jail. He has also been involved with several archaeological projects that relate to art and art history, including projects associated with Group of Seven artist J.E.H. MacDonald’s “A Tangled Garden” and the 19th century frontier artist Paul Kane’s “French River Rapids”. Most directly related to architecture is his most recent project, the new Thunder Bay Courthouse, where he has been providing aboriginal consultation.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Dragonfly: New AI Agent engine based only on Perception

Here’s a preview of the completely new AI agent engine in Dragonfly. We’re really excited about it. For a couple reasons….

The first is that this AI engine is based only on perception, i.e. what the agent “sees” in a given frame. No navigation meshes, no looking around corners – just raycasting. This means that you don’t need to preprocess your geometry at all: simply drop in the agents and let them go….

The second is that they go up (and down…)  ramps! This may seem fairly trivial, but we actually found it to be quite tricky without nav meshes or preprocessing. How do you know what a ramp is? When do you go up one? When on one, why do you keep going?

Enjoy!

 

Dragonfly WIP screenshots

The goal with Dragonfly is to provide a digital environment that simulates human interaction with architecture before it has been built. While this goal is probably unattainable, its pursuit will hopefully shed some light on this very important aspect of design. Initially, Dragonfly was meant to be an add on to Grasshopper but after our first proof of concept models, we had a really hard time getting the functionality we needed in the GH (and Rhino) environment. So we switched gears completely, and decided to design a standalone application. Which is exciting, but a whole lot of work….

Anyway, since Dragonfly will be presented at ACADIA 2011, I can’t give away too many details, but so far we’ve completely revamped the agent control system (they’re much smarter now…relatively speaking), setup a custom 3d environment (developed in Unity), and introduced a separate first person mode…

Here are some screenshots….

 

 

 

New SPM Vector Components release coming up and a New Project…

Yes, look for a new SPM Vector components upload on Monday (maybe Tuesday…). We’ve implemented a Collision dynamic that works with any collection of surfaces, and a much needed scale and velocity fall-off dynamic customizing the granularity of the simulation. We’ve also broken out Acceleration as its own component, which cleans things up visually, and created subcategories in the Dynamics for 3d and 2d (any surface) forces…

AND, we’ve started up work on the Dragonfly project. I posted some screenshots of this component (isovist, intentionality, geometry simulation thing…) on the Grasshopper forum a couple of months ago, but I was never totally convinced that Grasshopper was the right platform for it. So, after much thought and discussion, we will be implementing it as a Rhino and possibly Revit plugin that calls up a standalone simulation environment. I’ll post some progress shots as soon as possible, but our release date is mid October.

Dragonfly will be presented at ACADIA 2011 in Banff, Canada.

Very excited!