Developable Surface Modelling

A grasshopper definition for developable surface strips. Download here. Mårten Nettelbladt gives a nice description of developable surface types.

Developable Surfaces in Gehry's Architecture

Gehry's east river guggenheim project in NYC. The use of flexible sheet material like paper in physical models generates developable geometries.

Dennis Shelden, CTO at gt, describes in his phd thesis several ways to compute developable surfaces. Fig. (c) by Dennis Shelden.


Museum MARTa in Herford, Germany. Most of the roof surfaces are developable. Geometric modelling of the roof construction has been done by Jess Maertterer. Further discription on his page.

Exploring the PQ Strip

Helmut Pottmann and his colleagues form the Geometric Modeling and Industrial Geometry resarch unit at TU Vienna describe the concept of the PQ strip in this paper. The strip consists of planar quad faces. Fig. (c) by H. Pottmann et al.



By lofting the edges, a developable surface is generated. Developable surfaces can be flattened or unrolled without distortion.



Download a grasshopper definition of the PQ strip here.