Thursday, 1 October 2009

091001 STL Model for Skyscraper 03

The STL model for Skyscraper 03 is out! Thank god. Here are couple of shots of the printing process and end physical product.


3d-printing in process


3d-printing 50%


It is good that I rotated the model and laid it flat so the printing time is shorter


Starting Time: 09:34 am
Current Time: 10:47 am
Elapsed Time: 44:52
Estimated Time Remaining: 28:02
Sending Layers 238 of 415 (57% Completed)

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Skyscraper 03 Physical Model Photo shots















091001 2014 Winter Olympic Stadium By Populous

If you are a reader of Inhabitat, you would have probably seen this already.



2014 Winter Olympic Stadium By Populous Will Have Crystalline Skin
by Bridgette Meinhold, 09/30/09

Populous, a new venture recently spun-off from leading sustainable architecture firm HOK has unveiled its design for the stadium that will be the epicenter of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. Although the plans are still hazy, the project will feature several sustainable factors including a shimmering crystalline skin.



The translucent skin is meant to represent the “color and spectacle of the games when illuminated at night” and will envelope 40,000 people when the stadium is full. As with the entire plan of the Olympic games in Sochi, sustainability is key, although no details have yet been presented to outline the green features of the new stadium. Much like many of the eco-stadiums in recent years, advanced material technology, lightweight structures, as well as daylighting and natural ventilation will most likely play an important role.

“The main stadium design, in addition to the venue overlay plan we have prepared for the 2014 Games, delivers a wonderful vision for the winter Olympics, and a lasting sustainable legacy for Sochi. Its sweeping form responds to both its coastal location and mountainous backdrop, whilst its crystalline skin engages with its surroundings by day, and provides an iconic representation of the colour and spectacle of the games when illuminated at night. We are proud to be involved on such a level with Olympstroy,” said John Barrow, Populous senior principal. Populous is a fast moving and expanding firm with an impressive resume already in it’s first year of operation. Since December 2008, they have already won the bid to design the 2012 Olympic Stadium for London.

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This is what I interpret instantly when I first see it. Isn't that just look like a combination of Watercube by PTW and Beijing Olympic Stadium by Herzog & de Meuron?




It relates a little bit to my project where bio-cells as skin structure of the building. However, the project is still at concept stage. I just wonder how this building achieve sustainable standards and what sort of material will they choose to create that crystalline effects.

090930 Skyscraper 03

I have been working on Skyscraper 03 for more than 12 hours and finally I've got the scripts working, STL ready, and renderable. Pretty happy about the result to be honest. And hopefully the 3d-print will work perfectly fine for my 1:1000 model.

I will go through the process from here on.


Imported the mapped-points-drawings into AutoCAD which the acquirement of points have been illustrated in the previous post.


Started mapping up the highlighted points using dots and crosslines.


Here's the results for the 4 categories


I decided to use square panel for the dots. The facades of the tower are also laid out with 10m x 10m square grids


Array across the panels with the 4 block panels. Rotate them to give more variations on the facades


It seems that 10m x 10m will contain a lot of points. So I made the grid to 20m x 20m and the density of points is just about right


Import the dwg/dxf file into Rhino


Applied Voronoi-2D script on facade and started to create some floor plates.


The wireframe generated by Voronoi-2D is then imported to 3ds max for piping (i.e. making from lines/curves to solid/mesh)


Isolated the wireframe to reduce memory usage for Scripts


I have modifed the script that I wrote in the previous post. This script is more simple. What it does is considering
-> each cell as individual
-> offset curve inward
-> CurvethroughPolyline
-> clean up the scene
This script can be made much better in terms of the return and the input variables.


Then I did a simple PlanarSrf command by selecting all curves in the scene to create the cutout surfaces


I wrote another script for this particular move - Extrude each surface to its normal.
Each surface has their own normal of extrude. If you type in ExtrudeSrf and select all the surfaces, you might encounter a problem where some surfaces might extrude along the construction plane which is undesirable. So this script does:
-> enter extrude height value (preset Cap and Both sides prior to runscript)
-> considering each surface
-> extrude individually via its normal
-> clean up the scene
It runs quite a while and this is the result with a thickness for the "membrane"


This image shows the combination of the primary cell structure + the membranes


Playing with the shapes of the floor plates


And stack them up with a rotating configuration. The idea here is to create some double volume spaces.


Here is the overall model!


Import the whole model into 3dsmax for basic renderings


Rendering in process... and below are the resulting renders.









I like this render the most.

Wednesday, 30 September 2009

090930 Point Mapping

I proposed a hypothesis for these towers.

If the twin towers are going to be a very iconic and striking buildings in Perth, It has got to have a bit of reference of the city itself.

To generate Voronoi Cells, you need points and a boundary. The points are the extracted node points of the city in four categories - Traffic Junctions, Open Spaces, Commercial, Entertainment/Tourists.

Here are the point maps of the city, and these will give the "randomness" of the points on facade.


Traffic Junctions


Open Spaces


Entertainment/Tourists


Commercial


Overall

090930 Sketches for the Twin Towers

I was thinking of uploading some valid sketches here to show what I am actually doing and the possible final outcome.



Sketch on Pattern of the Carpark, this could possibly be the panel within the Voronoi cell structure. Ideally, the openings can be justified by the control of sunlight penetration. This sketch also include the possible outcome of the twin towers


This sketch look into the structure of the individual panel and also the Fenestration of the openings. The top sketches show the relationship of the buildings with the Perth Concert hall.


This is the rough idea of the form of the buildings. And the right bottom is the rough structure of the script.


This is a sketch by my tutor in exploring the sectional cell in relation to the human. Also exploring the possible paneling structure.