Tent Structures Question

Hi there!

I'm a beginner to Grasshopper and I am looking for some guidance as to how to model these kinds of fabric tent structures:

http://www.mos-office.net/?p=145

I heard you can use kangaroo?? but I am not fluent with it.......I've been using rhino membrane plugin, but I cannot achieve the round top profile....and it isn't very easy to control/preview the form.

I hope someone could help me out! Thank you! :)

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Daniel Piker on February 22, 2014 at 5:25am

Hi,
While you can use kangaroo for membrane relaxation, the project you link to doesn't look form-found. Aren't the shapes just skewed and cut cones?

Permalink Reply by s.honey on February 22, 2014 at 5:36am

Hi, thanks for a quick reply. Oh I thought it might be done via the membrane relaxation path....being a tent tensile structure. Would you say it's easier to just model it manually in this case?

Also, I would like to also look into replicating a similar surface canopy like Frei Otto's Multihalle / Munich Stadium, can I use the membrane relaxation in this case? Would you perhaps have a definition example that I could use?

Attachments:

gitterschale-1.jpg, 23 KB
Olympic_park_12.jpg, 181 KB

Permalink Reply by Daniel Piker on February 22, 2014 at 6:26am

I'm not familiar with that MOS project, but it looks like there are some straight rods keeping it in a conical form, so it's not really a tensile structure in the usual sense, and yes - I think it would be better to model it geometrically, without form-finding.

The Munich olympic stadium though - now that is a great example of form-finding!

Here's a photo I took of it when I visited last year:

It's actually a cable net, so slightly different from a fabric structure where the tension is in the membrane itself, but many of the same principles apply.

I posted some basic tensile form-finding examples here that should help getting started:

https://vimeo.com/27484394

https://vimeo.com/27489089

https://vimeo.com/27491050

You will also find other tutorials and examples if you search for things like "kangaroo mesh relaxation"

Mannheim on the other hand is a gridshell, with actively bent timber elements, which requires a different sort of form-finding. See here for some examples of this in Kangaroo:

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/xn/detail/2985220:Comment:734922

and here's a gridshell built in Romania designed using these definitions:

(photo by Dragos Naicu)