I M Pei's Unbuilt Hyperboloid enhancement by Dynamo

The Project 2 is a continuation of the ARCH 653 project. This time, the functionality of the Project 1 Revit model was enhanced using the visual programming extension called Dynamo.
The purpose of Dynamo for this project was to:

1. Use Dynamo to enter the height and scale parameters in order to control the entire mass containing all the families.
2. Coloring of the facade:
1. Simple coloring of the facade
1. Create a facade based on an Impressionist painting.
1. Assign color to the building facade based on the sun's position. 

The earlier model of Project 1 was improved upon in order to make the mass more 'parametric'. After that the dynamo work was attended to. The mass was brought to a project and dynamo scripting was done without adding the floors, roof and walls. This made the model flexible to changes.

 
CONTROL OF BUILDING DIMENSIONS

Using Dynamo, we can control the height and the scale of the model. The integer slider was used to control the determine the height and the scale of the building. The range given for the scale was 100' to 500' and for the height was 1000' to 3000' with a step value of 1 in each case.

 Figure 1: Dynamo script to control the height and scale.

 Figure 2: The original model.

 Figure 3: Changing the scale: The base plate radius is the controlling parameter. Originally it was 173', changed to 100' here.

 Figure 4: Changing the height: The model has a height of 1,570' changed to 1,000' for this case.

FACADE COLORING

This task was done at three levels:

1. A simple Red-Green-Blue coloring of the facade.
2. Using an Impressionist painting to create an 'impressionist facade'.
3. Using the sun's position to dynamically color the facade based on incidence of solar radiation.

1. A simple Red-Green-Blue coloring of the facade:

From the model, a single curtain panel was selected. In this case, it was a glass panel in the envelope of the building (glass panel). For controlling the degree of color, three integer sliders were used each ranging from 0 to 255, which provides the degree of coloration. The script and the output are as follows:

 Figure 5: The script for simple facade coloring.

 Figure 6: The output. Only the red value used here by entering 255 in the 'red' integer slider.



2. Using an Impressionist painting to create an 'impressionist facade':

The purpose would be to find a computer generated impressionist facade based on a famous painting. From the model, a single curtain panel was selected, which is the glass panel. There are a total of 30x24= 760 panels in my case. (Check the U-grid and the v-grid of the divided surface in the mass family. In this case, they were 30 and 12 respectively for each half of the envelope, so in total they are 30 x 24). So 30 and 24 pixels are given to cover the whole of the building and then the node is flattened to fit the format of override color in view. The script and the results are shown as below:

 Figure 7: The starry night by Van Gogh. (Source: Wikipedia Commons)

Figure 8: The script.

Figure 9: The output.

 

 Figure 10: Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte , Georges Seurat. (Source: Wikipedia Commons)

 Figure 9:  The output.

 3. Coloring as per Sun Path

Find Normal to the curtain panels: This task was done as per demonstration in the class room by Dr. Yan. The surface that is incident to solar radiation was determined by trials and that figure is a number. In this case, it is number 4.

Figure 10: The script.

Display Sun direction: The node “Dot” was used to calculate the relationship between the normal and the sun vector.

Figure 11: The script.

 Color the panels: The dot products were remapped from 0 to 1. Then a color range and map input values to color nodes were created. Finally, the node “override color in view” was used.

Figure 12: The script.

Figure 13: The entire script.

Figure 14: The final output.

Many thanks to Dr. Yan for his guidance and to my classmates for the support, especially Fatemeh.
Rohit Kumar.
PhD student, Spring 2017,
ARCH 653,
Texas A&M University.