White Paper: Creating an Editable Rhino Surface from Laser Scan Input

Creating an editable NURBS surface from complex scan data can be a challenging proposition, especially when the original scanned surface is irregular and not smooth in the conventional sense. This White Paper by Simply Rhino shows one workflow that allows an editable surface to be produced while maintaining the irregular qualities of the target surface.

Download Simply Rhino White Paper...

Sandy Hook Elementary - recovering and rebuilding

Four years ago, December 2012, Sandy Hook Elementary was reeling from a shooting that killed 20 children and 8 adults. This week, Sandy Hook Elementary School reopened with a sunlit, cheerful, new school -- a school with security subtly built in the design.

The new school design is by Svigals + Partners, a New Haven-based architectural firm.

The architect referred to Sandy Hook's rolling landscape with a sinuous roofline and two-toned hardwood cladding in the building facade. Doug Lovegren of Svigals + Partners commented,  "We did use Rhino to help us design the front wall which is curved and has a wavy top. We were having trouble playing with that form in Revit so we took it out to Rhino. We also used that to help us create our flattened elevations for that same wall."

For more details on achieving security in a beautiful environment, see the FastCo article....

RhinoVAULT 1.4 released

Intuitive form finding for funicular structures

The BLOCK Research Group, at ETH Zurich, recently announced the release of RhinoVAULT 1.4. The latest, freely available version comes with some neat, new features. Besides many bug fixes, this plugin for Rhino features the following new tools:

• Enhanced and easy-to-use form diagram generation
• Define guide curves to control the form and force diagram
• Improved API to hack into RhinoVAULT for your project-specific application
• RhinoVAULT can also be used to design pretensioned cable net structures

If you want to know more about geometric approaches to form finding and fabrication of funicular structures, please check out Matthias Rippmann's recently published PhD thesis: Funicular Shell Design - Geometric Approaches to Form F.

More info and download...
RhinoVAULT V1.4 New Features Video...

The plugin emerged from current research on structural form finding using the Thrust Network Approach to intuitively create and explore funicular structures. 

We are happy that the tool could be useful for students and professionals around the world to realize some amazing projects. Knowing about your work is very helpful for the development of the software and in general amazingly motivating. So, please get in touch if you have exciting projects made with RhinoVAULT you want to share or if you are interested in collaborative work and workshops (rippmann@arch.ethz.ch).

BIJORHCA PARIS, International Trade Show for the Jewelery Industry - September 2-5, Paris (France)

BIJORHCA PARIS
September 2-5, 2016
Paris Porte de Versailles - Pavilion 5, Booth # J31
Paris (France)


BIJORHCA PARIS is the only international trade show for jewelry, watches and technical supplies in France.

Come visit authorized Rhino reseller CADLINK and Formlabs, its partner in 3D printing for jewelry. Learn more about the solution RhinoGold + Form 2 and how it enables jewelry designers and craftsmen to create the most beautiful and intricate jewelry pieces.

More info...

Registration open for DIVA Day 2016 - Toronto

Registration is now open for DIVA Day in Toronto. DIVA Day is an annual symposium to discuss building performance and design using DIVA and environmental analysis tools in design practice, research, and architectural education.

Hosted by Solemma and the John H Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto, DIVA Day is September 30th, with DIVA and HDR photography workshops on September 29th and October 1st.

Register before September 5 to receive the DIVA Day t-shirt. Multiple attendees from the same firm receive 25% off the conference rates. Student rates are also available.

For more information email info@solemma.net.

To register ....

New Grasshopper video by O'Reilly Press

Luis Fraguada and O'Reilly Media have published a series of training videos, Visual Programming in Rhino3D with Grasshopper.

Luis is a busy professional. At McNeel Europe he is a Rhino developer and an authorized trainer. Also, he is the Research Director for Built by Associate Data, an international design and architectural practice in Barcelona, and an instructor at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia.  He has even designed a custom 3D food printer.

For architects and designers who work with complex shapes and surfaces, Grasshopper is a visual programming tool to create rules and parameters that can be easily changed and updated.

You can check out several of the training videos for free. Try them ....

Architecture Challenge 2016

Architecture Challenge 2016

5-10 September 2016

University of Applied Arts

Vienna, Austria

The Angewandte Architecture Challenge (AAC16) is an architecture summer school program collaborating with international experts and institutions. Architecture students interested in exploring integrated digital design and fabrication will simultaneously design a full-scale built project within the teaching environment of the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna - Die Angewandte.

The AAC16 Program is a week-long, intense event. Software introduction to Rhino / Grasshopper / Karamba / KUKA/prc will be followed by project design development in groups and daily reviews. The KUKA industrial robot at the robot laboratory of the Robotic Woodcraft research project will be used to fabricate selected projects, using a newly developed and innovative plastic forming process entailing a new manufacturing process chain. The workshop will close with a final presentation of the full-scale structure followed by an exhibition. 

Lectures by international experts will accompany the workshop. Ideal participants are architecture students with a bias in digital design and fabrication. Basic use of Rhino and Grasshopper is required. Knowledge of Karamba is a plus, but not required.

More details and registration...

Workshop: Translate | Re-active Structures

Translate | Re-active Structures

3-7 October 2016

Sapienza University

Rome – Italy

In an environment where everything is fluid, spaces cannot remain passive. Architects, engineers, and designers have to face new and increasingly complex challenges related to new social behaviors, digital landscapes, and climate changes. Inspired by biological organisms’ structural alterations in response to environmental stimuli we are keen on introducing similar behaviors in built structures. Advanced computation technologies and physical computing offer a completely new way to think and approach design, architecture, and urban planning, a way more coherent with our rapidly evolving habitat. We aim to investigate human-space interaction as a new design paradigm for physical spaces.

Using Rhino, Grasshopper, and some other plugins, this workshop will focus on generative design to explore structural behaviors. Introducing physical computing and Internet of things logic, it experiments with user-structure interaction.

More details and registration...

New Book: Rhino 5.0 for Jewelry by Dana Buscaglia

Dana Buscaglia, jeweler, Fashion Institute of Technology instructor and Authorized Rhino Trainer, has been hard at work. She's just published a new book for jewelry design using Rhino 5 for Windows. Enjoy 600+ pages of step-by-step Rhino tutorials. Exercises are for students and professionals alike.


The book is divided into two sections:

• Creation of 2D drawings and layouts
• Modeling of jewelry-specific 3D objects

Buy online here.

Open source tools from The Proving Ground

The Proving Ground recently completed The Things We Make, an eight-week program of summer prototyping with a group of talented, student interns.

Together they created tools to "highlight the potential for leveraging data and computation for a better built environment". They've made the tools open source in hopes that the design community will use the samples and incorporate them into their existing workflows.

Read here how they incorporated Rhino and Grasshopper into the tools.

Scan&Solve beta released

The Scan&Solve Pro beta for performing structural simulation is now released. The Scan&Solve WIP has graduated to become a beta.

Try now while it is free for all Rhino users. Download....

To learn more try the introductory free webinar on August 16th. The webinar will demonstrate how bonded assemblies of components may be simulated using multiple materials. The webinar covers the basics of setting up simulations, selecting materials, applying boundary conditions, and interpreting results. Advanced topics include specifying orientation for orthotropic materials, mixing restraint types, and editing the material database.

What: Webinar debuting the beta release of Scan&Solve Pro
When: August 16, Tuesday, 11 am CST

Another bridge, another design style

Rhino and Grasshopper are often used for bridge design, from the curves of a Paris pedestrian bridge to the straight lines of this London bridge.

Knight Architects is a British firm specializing in bridge design. With the engineering firm AKT II, Knight designed this footbridge as a part of the Merchant Square development at Paddington in west London.

The footbridge's five-blade steel deck opens and closes like a fan, using a hydraulically operated hinged mechanism and counterweights.

The footbridge is an understatement when closed and drama when it opens.

ArchDaily's clip showing the bridge in action ....
Details on the bridge design ....

Designing curves in a Paris pedestrian footbridge

ThinkParametric's Design Playground has published Using Grasshopper and Tekla to Construct a Pedestrian Footbridge in Paris.

It's a complete breakdown of the workflow and strategy used in the design and construction of a footbridge by DVVD Architects at ZAC Claude Bernard. Azhar Khan shares how he and his Elioth team acted as consultants, walking through the process and problems to build the footbridge.

The asymmetrical bridge twists from beginning to end. As the bridge's cross-section is continuously changing, each deck member is unique.

Elioth set up a Grasshopper model to represent the bridge's primary elements. Starting with the architect's Rhino model, they took the geometry to produce a simple model of the bridge's primary steel structure.

See Using Grasshopper and Tekla to Construct a Pedestrian Footbridge in Paris.

DIVA 4.0 for Grasshopper video tutorials

Solemma has recently announced their new DIVA 4.0 for Grasshopper video tutorial series. Fourteen tutorials, totaling over 5 hours of instruction, take users from the very basics of how to set up a RADIANCE visualization or a single-zone EnergyPlus model in DIVA 4.0/Archsim to quite advanced dynamic shading analyses, multi-zone models and even a fully integrated daylighting thermal simulation using DAYSIM/EnergyPlus.

Details...

Iris - WebGL Exporter, new version

Iris is a free Work In Progress file export plugin for Rhino 5 x64 for Windows, Rhino 5.1 for Mac OS X, and Rhino WIP (Windows and OS X). Iris generates a JSON document that is parsable and viewable through WebGL in a modern web browser. The objectives for the plugin include:

• A fast and easy way for Rhino users to distribute their designs with the least amount of dependencies possible.
• Conversion of as many Rhino Object Types and Features as possible in a static scene.

Many changes happened under the hood to decouple the Iris Web Application Logic from the UI logic. This will make it easier to develop alternative UIs if you are so inclined. In the future a few different example UIs will show how it can be done.

Download Iris - WebGL Exporter from food4Rhino...

Rhino Workshop Series at FabLab Tacoma

Rhino Workshop Series: Introduction to Parametric Modeling

6-7 August 2016

FabLab Tacoma

Join ART candidate, Doaa Alsharif, for this fun and informative two-day event in Tacoma, Washington. Mary Fugier from Robert McNeel & Associates, developers of Rhino, will be on hand for questions during the training. The event includes three sessions. Register for one or all three.

Sign up today!

Level 2 Rhino 5 for Mac begins next week

Image credit: Kyle Houchens, The Outside

Our Level 2 Rhino 5 for Mac online course begins next week on August 9th. Kyle Houchens will be our instructor for this course. Kyle is a very talented industrial designer, skilled instructor, an Authorized Rhino Trainer, the owner of the The Outside Digital Design and a McNeel Technician.

Sign up today!

Dates/Times:

• August 9-11 and August 16-18 (Tuesday-Thursday each week)
• Hours are 9:00am - 1:00pm each day
  Note: All times listed are Pacific time zone. Calculate your time zone.

For a sample of Kyle's online Level 2 training, see this video. Password: Test

Live training sessions let you to ask questions and interact with the class and instructor. In our usual format, all sessions will be recorded and posted for your study and review. If you cannot make a session, you will be able to catch up at your convenience.

Register here...

Digital fabrication workshop at IED

Register for the Rhino D+O+F - Design Optimization & Fabrication workshop, organized by IED Madrid.

Course Description

In this class, you'll learn to create and edit accurate free-form 3D NURBS models. This fast-moving class covers most of Rhino's functionality, including the most advanced surfacing commands. Also, this workshop will give students a functional understanding of Grasshopper and Parametric design. This will allow them to build on this understanding into more advanced projects of their own. The class also covers information on fabrication techniques with RP or laser machines and optimization and fabrication using RhinoCAM for CNC machines.

Details...


Space is limited!!!

Instructors: 

• Andres Gonzalez, worldwide director RhinoFabStudio.
  
• Ignacio Prieto, Professor of Architecture at IED
• Daniel García, Fab Lab IED Madrid manager
• Lorena Schmitzberger Sánchez, Trotec Spain
  

Date: 12-16 September 2016

Time: 10:00 to 14:00 & 15:00 to 19:00 h. [ 10 am-2 pm & 3 pm-7 pm ]

Location: IED - Madrid, Spain

  For more details or to register contact: Ignacio Prieto - Daniel García  or call 914 480-444

What is a RhinoFabStudio? A RhinoFabStudio™ (fabrication studio) is a small-scale digital workshop, certified by McNeel, with an array of Rhino and Rhino compatible software and computer-controlled tools and training. These tools cover the various leading-edge industrial methods and materials needed to design, analyze, and fabricate almost anything.