Monday, April 29, 2013

PREVIEW: CASE Interoperability - Managing Changes

Tracking and reacting to design changes between different platforms can be a very difficult task with current interoperability solutions.  This video demonstrates how the CASE interoperability tools can manage geometry changes across different platforms.  The video also shows some significant interface changes which further streamline the workflow and make updating models fast and easy.  ...anyone catch the login forms? >:)

We are actively working with with firms to consult on projects and deploy these tools.  Feel free to contact us if you are interested in collaborating!  http://www.case-inc.com/contact

Sunday, April 14, 2013

PREVIEW: Case Interoperability - Floors

The CASE Grasshopper + Revit tools have continued to evolve at a rapid pace this past month.  I have been beta testing these new capabilities at academic and professional workshops with much success.  I look forward to sharing a more extensive summary of these workshop experiences in the near future...

In the meantime, here is a short demonstration of a new capability for coordinating Floors between Grasshopper and Revit.  Towers often undergo numerous changes to their form as the design evolves through concept, schematic, and design development.  As these changes occur, it can be a tedious experience to update a Revit model to reflect floor slab changes... especially with more formally expressive towers where each floor edge might be unique!

This video demonstrates our approach to a workflow that allows for information to update the Revit model as changes are reloaded in.

Monday, April 8, 2013

Slingshot! is now OPEN SOURCE


With April Fools day a thing of the past....here is an announcement that is more legit :)

Open Sourcing some of my tools is something that has been on my mind for awhile now.  While it is not quite clear what the primary advantage of doing this will be (they are already free, after all), I see it as a way to continue to promote a culture of sharing computational processes. I also see open sourcing tools as a way for them live on beyond a standard update-release model and give the workflows and concepts the opportunity to become a part of other tools and processes.  Slingshot! hasn't seen a significant update in awhile and I hope that this will give it the juice it needs to go to the next level.

Slingshot! for Grasshopper is now available as an Open Source project on GitHub.  Slingshot! is a Visual Studio 2012 project written with VB.NET.  The Slingshot! code is now licensed under the GNU General Public License which guarantees...
  • the freedom to use the software for any purpose, 
  • the freedom to change the software to suit your needs, 
  • the freedom to share the software with your friends and neighbors, 
  • and the freedom to share the changes you make.
The code is going through some general updates at the moment such as code clean-up and other maintenance.  The current compiled version of Slingshot! available on Food4Rhino is still the recommended version to use.  New 'official' builds will be available through The Proving Ground in the near future

Monday, April 1, 2013

Announcing CRICKET FOR SKETCH-UP!

UPDATE:  Okay, okay, okay.... you got me.  As if the all-to-obvious name and under-cooked logo were not already dead giveaways...  Yes, Cricket for Sketch-up is April Fools fiction.  Interestingly (or maybe sadly?) this post has resulted in more unique daily traffic to The Proving Ground than any other single day of traffic.  Is it really that funny?... or is there really a compelling need in the design community for a visual programming language for Sketch-Up?   Let me know what you think.

Original post...

The Proving Ground is proud and excited to announce a new innovative plug-in for 2013:  Cricket for Sketch-up.  This new tool will usher in a new era of generative design that is combined with Sketch-Up's painfully easy-to-use modeling interface.

We are currently working through a few patent and copyright issues with some other insect-named program that we have never heard of, but rest assured The Proving Ground had this idea first and we will do our best to make sure computational designers can use the program they really want to use...

Visit The Proving Ground tomorrow, April 2, for an update on this exciting new tool...

Gotcha!