Literature Review 5 - Innovative Techniques of Generating Form

There are different types of software products used across the design industry to manipulate form and dynamic-physical simulations. For instance the entertainment industry uses 3DSMax, Maya, Softimage and Lightwave and Product Design and Architecture commonly use Design Studio, Viz, Rhino, Form Z and Solid Thinking.

The digital Architecture style, referred to as 'shrink wrap' generates highly interactive surfaces that are able to exchange information with the physical world. These programs introduce a forth variable into the traditional 3D spatial variables of time and essentially allows the designer to manipulate movement.

As such, Inverse Kinematics (IK) help study the progress in relationships between program and the site over time and Direct Kinematics (DK)manipulates actions of a terminal part (e.g., bones in the body) to determine movement of the rest of that structure (i.e., move the bones and the rest of the body form follows). Here various parts in the chain are hierarchically connected with the 'prime' being the first link, and the 'object of the final effect' being the end one.

Another feature of such software, NURBS (Non Uniform Rational Bezier Splines) are a technique of generating poly surfaces using cross sections and are commonly used to generate architectural coverings (non uniform variations and deformations).They are ideal for modifying surfaces (edit the control vertices) and change quantity, position and value of weight.

By cross fertilizing the design process with these data simulation technologies, architects, such as our tutor Florian has done, are able to generate interesting forms playing with the particle systems (PS). Today in class we did experiments with this exact technology and set the ps forms into lines of geometry which reacted with the forces present that we were emitting from our empties. Variables I noticed affected the form and also which this article's author notes, were quantity, size, motion, type, flow compactness (form), time intervals and management of collisions. My next few posts will show images and scenes from this process.

This all contributes to the architecture profession as it is a step closer to intelligent systems that could modify themselves based on objective needs.

De Luca, F. and M. Nardini (2002). Behind The Scenes, Birkhäuser.