The Assumption of Associativity

I was checking out some new modeling applications last week and found some tools for repeating elements along a curve.  Cool, I fired it up, and sent a sphere happily rolling and multiplying  along a lovely spline landscape.  Zoom!  Some nice controls to establish spacing.  Zooooom! I grabbed the spline,  moved a node and . . . Nothing. Happened. To. The. Spheres?  They just hovered there, waiting . . . for associativity?  for gravity?  for meaning?  Surely they should move with the spline.  Didn’t they want to be close to their spline?  This spline, that guided them, that taught them how to rise and fall, who steadied them as they rounded their first corner and reigned them in before falling off the precipice of the final node?   What were they thinking?  Ungrateful little punks.

Or, maybe they weren’t.  In being propagated along this transient curve, these elements had found their final resting place.  Like fruit flies, they were born and grew up and mated and died in only the blink of an eye.  I shook the spline just to make sure. No,  I was seeing complete corpses of a whole lifecycle.  I looked, bewildered at these exhausted little orbs, their shiny highlights still full of the glow of youth.  It was heartbreaking, so many of them to have lived for such a short time.   

My hand trembled a bit as I closed.  Save changes to document?  No, no.  Better to forget.

Comments

  1. Have u tried Grasshopper with Rhino?

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  2. super like... its nice to know others have similar experiences too..

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  3. @Stamatis: yes, it's lovely. I wish I had time to use GH more.

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  4. And I thought the haiku were deep..

    On another note, I do wish GH would let me grab the spline.

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  5. What if I said there is a way to repeat along a curve in Revit 2012?

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  6. GH owns, I did a AA visitting school and :O!!!!, how many time I loose trying to do miracles on Revit. It have to run much much much more to be 30% that GH is.

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  7. Well, at least we know why high end firms use rhino/grasshopper and not Revit. Go figure.

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  8. I don't think Rhino/GH can produce construction documents...for me, that's the big caveat...Rhino/GH is great for modeling, but translating that back into something that can be used for construction docs is a whole different story...I guess if we are just talking about for conceptual design, I see the point...yet, Revit has come a long way, and I would imagine in 95% of building designs, the 3D tools in Revit are more than enough to do what needs to be done...yet maybe a little slower beginnings than say sketchup.

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  9. I agree Josh (although for vary particular projects I have used Rhino through to Fabrication).

    By the same token we shouldn't be starting models from scratch again in software such as Revit (if a GH or Rhino model exists) and I don't think training all staff to be proficient at Revit (and the modelling time) is very effective.

    If you haven't seen it already, I've been developing tools for model exchange from Rhino and Grasshopper to other BIM software primarily using Industry Foundation Class neutral format. Refer to http://geometrygym.blogspot.com for more details.

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