Generative Components tutorials
One of my students asked what order they ought to do the GC tutorials that are on the tutorials page. For some reason I hadn’t actually thought about that – duh!
So here it is:
- Theoretical framework
This is actually slides for a lecture, so it doesn’t make as much sense as it could if had been designed with being read in mind. That said I think if you use a bit of imagination then it is a pretty useful place to get started. - Making a reactive component & Programming a scribble
These have a long history, he reactive component tutorial was first written sitting in the Qi cafe in Oxford to use with Kathrine Findlay‘s students at Dundee university. Since then it’s been through more than 20 major revisions and I’ve used to teach a huge number of people, so it should have a fair few of the kinks ironed out. However, I haven’t updated it for a while, so there are some changes to the interface, mainly the look of the buttons, and that thectrl+clicking is no longer needed.
It is both tutorials in one PDF. There are also videos to go along with both of these: - Fabrication planning tuorial This was written sitting in the Sydney Botanic Gardens with my laptop plugged into a post and then the wire hidden under a bag so that the rangers didn’t see it! It was for Anthony Burke‘s masters of advanced architecture students. It’s quite simple, but just gives a bit more practice with GC, and starts you thinking about making real things.
- Scripting fundamentals
This explains a few things about scripting that are not about what to write to make the computer work, but more about how to write code that makes your life easier, formatting, commenting etc. - Testing
This is the modelling equivelent of the scripting fundamentals tutorial, it is essentially theoretical/philosophical, so it leaves you to apply the idea in your own way. It tells you about how to think about your project to avoid getting bitten later. - Strategies – These two are about how to make planar quads. They are a bit light, and becasue GCuser is no more, there are no example files. I’ll try to make some one day.
- End
By this point you know everythign there is to know about GC.
Whaaaat, not a chance! Keep playing, and go to the forum and post a lot of questions. Rob Woodbury‘s website (and book – Elements of Parametric Design) has a load of great stuff too.
So there you go. There are lots of other tutorials out there, and if you think that one would slide into this sequence well then let me know and I’ll link it in there.
New research student
Jay is a final year student at UNSW doing architectural computing. He is interested in using the Microsoft Kinekt as a part of the architectural workflow, BVN, and by proxy I, will be the ‘client’ on this project so I’m excited to see what he comes up with. There is already a huge background in UI for design, so he is currently doing a lit review of that work. He’s posting his reviews of papers and other useful sources here.
With Flora’s ubimash work there is already a substantial technical basis for this work so there is a great possibility to do some really interesting user-focused work.
DS6 Crit notes
Last week I was invited to help out with some crits at Oxford Brookes for DS6 by Toby Shew. I took some notes, so I thought I’d share them here. I must apologise to the last few students as they didn’t get notes because my battery ran out.
As always, it was lovely to be back on home turf, and I hope that these scrawlings are useful.
ideas speed dating
This is a bit of a UTS architecture classic, I think I first heard about it from Adrian Lahoud and Tarsha Finney a few years ago, and Friday’s class was the first chance I’ve had to really try it out.
The format is simple, split the class in half, and sit the two halves facing each other. Then get them to talk about their ideas for 4 minutes. I had everyone sitting pretty close together – it gets pretty noisy but it seems to pump up the endergy a bit. Once the 4 minutes is up you get one side of the group to rotate. Then start again.
It got good feedback from the class. It's almost too easy, it feels a bit like cheating! Because of the short time and high energy the ideas seem to flow so quickly. There is a bit of a problem with how to rearange the group so that the static ones get to talk to each other too, but I'd imagine that once I get around to reading group theory in the bedroom I'll have a way to fix that.
I had an odd number so I popped the odd one off the end and gave them a 4 minute write up session so that they could capture their ideas.
Ruby Lessons
I’ve just started running a set of Ruby programming lessons for Sketchup here in the studio at BVN.
Lessons 1-4 are written, and 1&2 are even spell checked! If you want to join in, then do lesson 1 and then put your homework in the comments.
If you want to come to see me explaining it all, then lessons 2&3 will be on the coming two Mondays (then it’s SG and UK for a bit!!).