Grasshopper, Rhino, oh my!

Mike is a Grasshopper genius, and an amazing philanthropist! I was struggling with my studio/Digital Fab project on Friday, and he whipped up a Grasshopper file for me over the weekend. Not knowing much about GH, it's been a really great tool for learning the logic. Even though I took a class in Digital Project, and got pretty comfortable with simple constructions, the method is completely different. Grasshopper is more math-based, or rather.. it's a visual diagram of scripting... where as I found DP to be more physical-relation based (I suppose it's the difference between Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry?)

Anyways, this is what the GHX file looks like:


And this is what it does:



I'm using Grasshopper to take a section of my unrolled 3d surface and apply a varying density of cellular divisions. The size is determined by how far apart the original surface lines are, so that when the surface (my "sails") are wider, there are fewer divisions. I am then using this base geometry to FlowAlongSrf and apply the truss pattern to my sail.
This is all really simple modeling, but is fun to produce loads of iterations.

I've also had some great luck! IIT has a really nice 3d printer in the MMAE department, but it's incredibly simple. No one, that I'm aware of, in the architecture department has ever used it, or even knows about it. I spoke with a few people in their building last week to discuss fabrication options (I wanted to see if they could fabricate a few of my details full scale) but no luck. However, I've been emailing the 3d printer guy back and forth, and he is printing my model pieces at no charge! (instead of having to pay $100). Not sure why, but I'm incredibly excited (and thankful!) that he's doing this!