Saturday 18 September 2010

Planar Quad Mesh Design Pt. 1


A parametric tool for the design of planar quadliteral meshes based on uv-grid and normal directions of a design-driving NURBS surface.

The glazed freeform grid shell of the hippo house in the berlin zoo, has been designed by Schlaich, Bergerman + Partner. It consists of planar quadliterals, the geometry is based on a translational surface.

In this
paper, a comprehensive discussion about geometric aspects of surface tesselation, by H.Pottmann et. al., can be found. A direct parametric approach, developed by Gehry Partners and Schlaich, Bergemann & Partners is described in this paper.

Download the definition for the planar quad mesh tool here.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Amazing work!!! Can you elaborate a little on the restrictions on the input surface - i.e. which surfaces can be more accurately approximated with this method? And can you explain exactly what's being adjusted with the graph mappers?

Lorenz Lachauer said...

The whole definition is an extension of the idea of translational surfaces. You should have a look into the second paper by Gehry & Partners et. al., especially Fig. 7 describes roughly the meaning of the two graphs. They define the shape of two edges. The position of the node in the PQ mesh is always in the direction of the surface normal. It works quite well if you use the input surface as plan of the roof. The input surface is a control mechanism, not the design itself.

Robert Vierlinger said...

Thank you for sharing this definition, I used it at a 5-days workshop on shells in Lyon/Fr for quickly designing an anti- & synclastic structure.
See some pictures here.
BR Robert
TU Vienna, TU Delft

Vittorio Menna said...

hi lorenz,
great idea! i really needed it...
i tried to make it work but i get strange results... i cannot get it to work with little distances from the surface, it becomes a fuzzy hairy hedgehog!
how can i approximate in a good way my input surface? is it possible?
thanx
bext
vittorio

Jan Stenberg said...

Very nice work indeed!
I wonder if it is possible to use this setup as a "to planar quads-converter" to just convert an existing design? Eg. a rather complex thing as hand or a face? I´ve tried a bit, but I´m not at all familiar with Grasshopper and my results are not that encouraging.
Best regards Jan Stenberg

Unknown said...

hi there,

ty for sharing, but the vb outputs Null... using gh 0.9.0056

maybe u could have a look ?
thx

Unknown said...

Hi,

It looks awesome! I'd really like to play with the script a little hehe (:
Any chance you could re-upload the file?
I'm having trouble downloading it.

many thanks,
Yulian

Nouman Shakeel said...

Amazing blog. Check

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