Michal Piasecki » generative components

Generative Components workshop in Wroclaw

Michal Piasecki — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 20:10:35 +0000

Przemek Jaworski and Michal Piasecki will tutor a Generative Components workshop at the School of Architecture of Wroclaw University of Technology. The workshop will take place over four weekends starting from 16th of April and finishing on 5th of June. More information is available here.

Przemek Jaworski i Michal Piasecki poprowadza warsztaty z Generative Components na Wydziale Architektury Politechniki Wrocławskiej. Warsztaty odbędą się podczas czterech weekendów. Zaczną się 16 kwietnia a zakończą 5 czerwca. Więcej informacji znajduje się tutaj.

Open Generative Design

Michal Piasecki — Tue, 11 May 2010 11:43:27 +0000

Open Generative Design is an initiative started by dr. Sivam Krish. The aim is to develop platform independent algorithms which can be used to browse through solution spaces of various parametric definitions. The algorithms will be written in Excel and special add-on will be developed for each parametric modeling package. The ones for Solidworks and Rhino Grasshopper are already available for download and others, including one for Generative Components are under development. Below you can listen to Sivam introducing the idea himself:

The first iteration of the Excel spreadsheet script will generate instances of parametric definitions which will be random but constrained by maximum and minimum values of each of the attributes. Further iterations will feature a variety of browsing algorithms. For now have a look at how it works with Solidworks:

Parametric Modeling and CAM Technologies at WAPW

Michal Piasecki — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 11:18:17 +0000

“Parametric Modeling and CAM Technologies” was a seminar tutored by WF (Agata Kycia, Dorota Kabala, Krzysztof Gornicki, Krystian Kwiecinski and Michal Piasecki) at the WAPW (Warsaw University of Technology, School of Architecture). The seminar took place from October 2009 till February 2010 and was an elective course for master of architecture level students.

The aim of the seminar was to make students familiar with the notion of a CAD/CAM continuum. Students developed group projects using parametric modeler Generative Components. The projects where intended to be manufactured using a subtractive computer aided manufacturing technology of choice. The project above (by group 1: Joanna Bartos, Malgorzata Piotrowska, Jerzy Soltyk and Andrzej Zajkowski) was CNC milled and the one below (by group 4: Marcin Brzeski, Damian Pedrakowski, Patrycja Michalak, Agnieszka Rokicka and Maciej Rudnicki) was laser cut.

More information is available on workshops factory blog.

NURBS surface in Processing

Michal Piasecki — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:57:00 +0000

Couple of quick impressions from a Processing sketch, which I’m currently developing. The sketch is going to become a basis of my first PhD experiment: comparison of a “parametric” interface and a “genetic algorithm” interface of a configurator for mass customization of furniture. The experiment will actually be conducted online, so more details will follow. For now I will only say that in order to compare two interfaces I need a parametric definition of an object, which can be manufactured with CAM. I have decided to go for a NURBS surface with control points wrapped in both U and V dimensions.

Processing sketch was developed based on Alasdair’s Turner’s NURBS surface sketch.

Before moving to Processing I did a couple of quick sketches in Generative Components:

WF_092: Generative Components and digital fabrication workshop in Warsaw

Michal Piasecki — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:34:40 +0000

WF’s Agata Kycia, Krzysztof Gornicki and me recently had a pleasure of tutoring a Generative Components and digital fabrication workshop in Warsaw. The event was organized in collaboration with Bentley Systems Polska and sztuka-architektury.pl. You can read much more about it on WF’s blog.

Generative Components – scripting with C#

Michal Piasecki — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 22:16:35 +0000

This week I was taking part in three-days Generative Components workshop at the University of Westminster in London. Half of the first day was dedicated for introduction to the GC environment and model-based transactions. Later Sean Hanna and Alasdair Turner gave several tutorials on script in GC. The scripting language is C#, which turns out to be very similar to Processing.

Here is what Agata Guzik and me managed to script by the end of last day.

The easiest thing to do in GC is to populate a 2-dimensional grid of points (most probably “polygons by point grid” in GC nomenclature) with components. Sean introduced a way of breaking away from this notion by turning a 3-dimensional array of points into a 2-dimensional one. He still created a single plane of “polygons by point grid” but this time based on two 2d arrays of points arranged into one.

We then tried to rewrite the script so that it could incorporate more 2d arrays. We have created a new 3d array and we stacked 2d arrays (each containing two rows of points) one on top of another. Unfortunately it turned out that we can not use “polygons by point grid” any more – since it can be only fed with 2d array and not a 3d one. We have used a b spline surface by poles instead and then we have converted the surface into a set of polygons. Last step was (in order to celebrate GC’s name) population of the polygons with components which have a capacity of opening or closing (based on the value of graph variable).