As mentioned in the previous post, one of the next steps was to translate the method into one that would allow for the replication of a predefined unit. Fortunately, I was able to broadly copy the grid generation already done, however, I tweaked it as I was no longer generating extrusions married to a set of perpendicular planes.

As annotated above, the ‘vertical grid duplication’ element replaced the previous YZ/XZ grid generation, as I simply* duplicated the XY plane the requisite number of times - as defined by the number of ‘beams’, or planes, I required. I set the number of planes to 8.

*I spent a good amount of head-scratching trying to, in essence, create a recursive transformation. The Pufferfish ReTransform definition doesn’t like playing with points, so I ended up using Series, Stack, Repeat & Duplicate elements to provide the required series of transformations.

The next step was easier - take predefined BREP definitions, then find the points contained within. As before, PointInBREP & Dispatch to ensure that I’ve grabbed the correct filtered list.

A slight complication occurred, as when I originally told the replication unit to duplicate at each point as contained within the moulds, it duplicated at the first point, but then failed to at each subsequent point. I realised that I was asking a single set of 11 BREPs (the replication unit) to “duplicate” (Move Transformation) N times, where N>1, hence the failure. Stack & Duplicate came to the rescue once again, and I successfully replicated the single unit across the set of points, as shown below. The generated form would still need to be manually tidied & adjusted for structural engineering considerations, however as a computational exercise, I feel that this was a success.

After this, I want to generate a topographical grid based upon an existing image, and then seed it with a replication unit. Fortunately, I should be able to refer to a grasshopper tutorial run during the 2nd year of undergrad to get me going.