Sunday, November 27, 2011

Secret Agent Men





No, this is not a post about secret agents... but rather computational agents! (ok, bad joke!)
Jose Sanchez has an excellent example of flocking agents at the Plethora Project. Additionally, Satoru Sugihara has some great tutorials on using the agent class for piGeon.

My videos below show flocking behavior in 3D...specifically in relationship to the boundaries defined by a surface.

I am fascinated by the ability to use this behavior to describe irregular surface patterning. The processing sketch constrains the agents to the UV space of the surface and draws traces of the agent movement. The color change refers to the UV position.




I am also interesting dynamic human interaction with the agent system. This example shows a ControlP5 interface for dynamically changing the flocking variables (alignment, cohesion, and separation). I can also adjust the line connection variable to study the relationship structure.


Sunday, November 20, 2011

Processing: Custom Paneling Interface

Building on my previous examples of combining the piGeon library with ControlP5, I put together another example showing an interface for exploring paneling options on a surface created in Rhino. The user is able to select different paneling patterns (quads, triangles, diagrids, etc) and visualize them as surface or wireframe cells. U and V parameters are controlled by sliders (sound familiar?)

Of course, this is something that is easy to accomplish with parametric tools like Grasshopper. However, my interest here is in being able to customize a simple, standalone, and easy-to-learn interfaces for specific design problems. Easy enough for grandma to use...


More as I have it...


Sunday, November 6, 2011

iGeo: Open Source 3D Software Library for Java

**updated with code**

This is one of the coolest things I have come across in awhile...

Satoru Sugihara, recently release iGeo: a "free and open source 3D modeling software library in Java for computational design in architecture, product design, interaction design and more."

As part of my enthusiastic response to this tool kit, I thought it would be an interesting experiment to combine piGeon with another popular processing GUI called ControlP5. ControlP5 is another great open source library for creating interactive controls such as sliders, toggles, knobs, and other gizmos.





piGeon provides an interface for Processing which makes iGeo easy to learn for quick implementation. Satoru has also provided some great tutorials...

iGeo is very extensive and well documented. The library provides fantastic support for NURBS and it is possible to read and write Rhino 3dm and Obj files.