Grasshopper Hour - First results

So a few of us have spontaneously banded together for one hour bouts over the last few days to brush up on our Grasshopper skills and challenge ourselves to create some interesting and responsive definitions.

For those unfamiliar with ghoppah it is a free plugin for Rhino that can be used to parametrically control geometry for rhino. this means creating relationships and systems for how this geometry is generated and/or manipulated based on certain rules. I think that's a decent way of explaining it at least.

So our objective with the first exploration was something that Perry was trying to explore for his groups Ontario Place Collaborative Exercise submission. The intent was to be able to control a grid of squares so that they could gradientially transform relative to a point in both their shape (from square to circle) and in size (from large to small).

Some of you may be familiar with the now cliche use of attractor points.

This was the basis for controlling the definition. You can easily find this definition on the internet.

Instead of circles we figured we could take the edges of square and remap the distance values between the attractor point and each grid cell point to retrieve values to control the fillet. The relationship between the edge length and the fillet was x/2. This worked successfully, though in retrospect i think we were all expecting the filleting to appear more dramatic as an effect.

At first we thought we would be scaling all the squares relative to the point AFTER the filleting occurred, but realized the whole grid would also be scaled. Then we figured what if scaling took place first (again, a function of the remapped distances to the grid cells) and then the filleting took place. When we rearranged the placement of the square component in the definition, we also realized there was a fillet option in there. So we connected all that stuff up and unfortunately the reverse operation was taking place: we had hoped the geometry would scale down relative to the attractor point, but instead the smallest geometry was exactly where the attractor point was. Jordan then showed us that reversing the list for the fillet input worked to achieve what we sought. What still doesn't seem to be working is that the geometry that is closest to the attractor point doesn't generate a square with sharp corners. Not sure how to resolve this just yet.

Ask me for a copy of the ghx file if you want to play around with it. Can't seem to find how to

post up files here.