ACADIA 2010: Presentation

Grasshopper + AutoCAD IPC Video

A demonstration of inter-process communication between Grasshopper and AutoCAD. Grasshopper sends remote commands to AutoCAD to create 2D drawings of the tower floor plates. Tower floors are defined by arcs.

Galapagos + Ecotect: Tower Form-Finding Video

The video shows a snippet of a tower form-finding process using Grasshopper, Galapagos, and Ecotect.

Custom Grasshopper components are used to send a tower mass to Ecotect and retrieve information via a DDE connection. Galapagos evaluates the tower analysis results and looks for shapes which have the lowest total radiation.

A low-poly shape is used for the purposes of speed in this video.

Web3D, VRML Testing

I'm not seeing much info on the use of using VRML or X3D on my usual blog circuit... so I thought I would do a quick post on the topic to point interested people in the right direction.

Setting up your web browser to view 3D files:

VRML Plugin and Browser Detector
Cosmo Player (View VRML Files in a web browser...I am currently using this to quickly test models)

After you have installed a web browser plug-in, you should be able to freely view 3D files...

like this Rhino file I converted to the VRML format.

Here are some other helpful resources....

Web3D Consortium
X3D for Developers

Give it a go... it's a lot of fun!