Final Poster

For this first project I became very interested in Crystallography, the study of crystal forms. The nature by which crystals form gives them a very specific aesthetic I was interested in replicating using generative/variable methods within Grasshopper. Although true crystallography concerns itself quite heavily with the chemical reasoning behind crystals forming the way they do I was much more interested in replicating the final geometry. There are very many different types of crystals which form under many different conditions which result in many different forms and geometries. Creating a single grasshopper file to reproduce the exact parameters of each of these would be close to impossible. Crystal geometries form in many different ways and it is important to acknowledge that although there are crystal types it is very rare for a crystal formation not to have irregularities that differentiate it from other crystal of the some type. No two crystals are alike. This conclusion with an understanding of the basic crystal aesthetic and focus on external geometry lead me to consider using subtractive means of carving away the desired form from the base geometry. The base geometry was defined with a variable that allowed it to be changed from a triangular prism to a rectangular prism easily. Three randomly selected points of this prism were then used to define the rotational axis of the subtractive geometry which was defined as a basic rectangular prism defined by four points and then extruded. The dimensions of these prisms were also randomly defined. The rotational variables of the subtractive geometry are the main variables of the generated geometry. Randomly generating values for these variables were experimented with but these did not prove to efficiently generate the desired aesthetic (a much more complex system which understands the volume of subtraction was required but a suitable one could not be developed.) Considering this I choose to manually define these variables to develop the desired aesthetic by hand. The points being subtracted are still defined randomly as too are the dimension of the subtractive geometry. The rotation on the z axix, rotation on the x axis, the extrusion amount and the z-value are meant to be adjusted manually. For an example of these variable please click here.