Creating a Perforated metal panel Facade

I am an Architecture Student and I am designing a perforated metal facade screen system. i am trying to use Grasshopper to help me design the density of the perforations on the facade. Attached is a jpg of a diagram of what I am trying to do. Id like the whiter areas to have a higher density of perforations and the Darker areas to have a lesser density of perforations. Do you have any suggestions on how to make this work? I found a few tutorials that used a bmp. file like what i attached to apply the perforations to. From the examples i found, this was only being applied to one panel when I’m trying to apply this to an entire building facade. Just setting up the grid with all the nodes ends up lagging the system. If I have a 1 inch sub-division on the facade for the perforations to be initially set to I end up with 2.5 million nodes. Ideally Id like the subdivisions to be closer than 1 inch. Maybe I’m approaching this wrong or maybe i need to split the facade up into smaller pieces to make it work.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Kurt Kimsey on April 6, 2016 at 3:25pm

This is the diagram of how id like the perforation density to reflect.

Attachments:

Screen Shot 2016-04-06 at 12.46.20 AM.png, 283 KB

Permalink Reply by Armin Seltz on April 8, 2016 at 3:07am

I think you are going the right way. You can use the image sampler to get the values for the perforations. I think you need to think if it is sensible to do it for the whole facade. 2.5 million is a lot. But then you should think if it is really necessary to do the whole thing in grasshopper. You can do some smaller sections and show those close up if you will only render it. It wouldnt be one large piece in reality, so you could divide your facade into panels and do the perforations one panel at a time. But in the end grasshopper doesnt really mind if there is a lot of data. I have some patches that take a couple of minutes to calculate for something similar (creating a pattern, offsetting, extruding).

So I would split it up into smaller panels like it would in the real world and do some close-up renders with those. The mesh with 2.5 million holes for the facade would be huge as well and if you are not rendering directly in Rhino that might be a problem.

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