Regenerate 4 Skins of Absolute Towers

Regenerating the Envelope of Absolute Towers

In this Project, I tried 4 ways to regenerate the envelope of the Absolute Tower. 

For alglorithm, I mainly use Voronoi, WeaverBirdsand Paneling tools. Besides, I also use

Python script to generate a certain kind of skin. I will introduce the 4 kinds of skin one

by one in the following part.

  

Skin 1. This is the first skin. The flowing windows.

I tried to create flowing windows for the tower. There are 56 planar curves to loft the basic shape.  First I use Dispatch node to split the 56 planar curves into 2 lists. One list is the upper curve of a certain level and the other list is the lower curve of a certain floor. Then I use random node to move a series of interpolate points  of each list. After getting the new interpolate points, I can generate two lists of new curves. Finally, I loft them to get the flowing windows. If you use the slider of random seed, you can get different shape of the windows. 

In this way, the shapes could be easily controlled by changing the seed of Random node. It looks like the windows are flowing when you sliding the number slider.

This is the rendering of the first skin. You can notice that the random and irregular shape of the curtain wall. 

Skin2. Voronoi skins and Paneling Tools

About the second skin, I use Voronoi and Paneling Tools to generate a random honeycomb pattern as the envelope. First I create a 1*1 grid as the modular of the voronoi pattern.  And then after several steps I could get  new random points based on this 1 by 1 grid. Using these random points, I connect them to Voronoi node and get the honeycomb lines. Finally I offset these lines and rebuild the curves, in this way I could get the modular pattern. Then I go back to Rhino, use the command "flow on surface" to attach the pattern on surface. 

This is the rendering of part of the building. My laptop is too slow to run the calculation load, so I just attach the pattern on a small portion of the building to represent the final effect.

Skin 3. Trangulation of 2D Pattern

The third skin is turning the photos to a digital and pixel skin.  Here is the basic idea: we randomly arrange points within the picture region, and then we generate dalaunay trangulation. In the center of each triangle, we snap the RGB value based on center point and then turn them to trangular colored region.  

The first step is to change the picture to delauney trangulation.    Populate a 2-D mesh region with 1500 points. By using Delauney node, the mesh is exploded into several triangular faces. Then use a image sampler to regenerate the new pattern with repeating colors.

Then I use several steps to regenerate the 2D picture mesh to a new 2.5D mesh. This new mesh is like a relief. You can see the small polygon subdivisions has different tilting angles and different Z height. In fact, the small subdivisions are fit to the face's contour. The light the skin is, the higher the subdivision is. The darker the skin is, the lower the subdivision is.

                                             

                                             

      

 This strategy could be used to arrange a specific pattern of the electronic screen attached on tower. 


Skin 4. Colored Point Envelope (python scripting)

The first step is to bake the tower's original envelope to mesh and bake the points on mesh. Then we define a function called createColoredPoint, by giving it x,y,z value and r,g,b value, we can generate plenty of colored point on mesh. And these colored points have various color ranging from a light level to the dark level. You can change the expression of r,g,b to get different effect.

I think it my use as a way to compare the different neo lights on buildings in night.