Stadium Bowl Generator

Over the last month or so, my coworkers and I at HKS Line have been developing a bowl generator our sports group could use when designing new stadiums. It is far enough along now that I thought other people might like to see what we have done.

To date, we have built the generator in two parts. The first piece builds the bowl sections in 2D. The second part, allows 3D bowl geometry to be created, studied, and analyzed in real-time. It is built in Grasshopper but most of the work is done through ghPython. I built the script so it is multi-threaded. This allows most of the intensive work to be run simultaneous which gives much better refresh rates.

This is just the start of our plans for this generator. I am developing an external controller that will be much easier to use and link into grasshopper. We also want to rebuild the bowl geometry into Revit as intelligent geometry rather and just an import. Finally, we are also looking at other analysis options that can be integrated into the script for better design feedback while designing.

These two videos show the two components:

2D Stadium Section Generator

3D Stadium Bowl Generator

I would love to hear any questions or comments.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Jon Mirtschin on March 17, 2013 at 2:40am

Hi Ryan,

Great work. I haven't looked at your files yet, but if you're interested in testing an OpenBIM approach (IFC to Revit, Archicad, Bentley etc) then I've attached a similar test I set up for bowl tiers. I'm happy to discuss and assist further if you're interested.

Cheers,

Jon

Attachments:

120920 bowl test tier.gh, 15 KB
120920 bowl.ifc, 9 KB

Permalink Reply by Ryan Gathmann on March 18, 2013 at 2:04pm

These is a cool example. I dont have geometry gym installed so I cant run the grasshopper, but the IFC file import is amazing! You can even edit the geometry after it has been imported. I am very impressed.

Permalink Reply by Jon Mirtschin on March 20, 2013 at 10:57am

Editing the objects after they are "imported" is an important aspect of the work I'm doing. More often than not grasshopper models (or other generative solutions) aren't necessarily used all throughout a design (even preliminary stages although it might be revived as the next stage begins).

Did you use the native IFC import to Revit? I have been working on my own importer there to get best possible results including using IFC4.

Permalink Reply by Ryan Gathmann on March 20, 2013 at 8:41pm

I used the default IFC importer in Revit 2013. When I checked that simple example, it was all editable. Which was very impressive. Very nicely done. So will you use the Revit API to rebuild the geometry in Revit then with your importer?

Permalink Reply by Jon Mirtschin on March 20, 2013 at 11:25pm

That's great, I hadn't tested native revit importer on this file. IFC for most of it's life has been implemented for "coordination" than model sharing, but I think the tide has well and truly changed on that and we can see it implemented for it's capability of model exchange.

Yes, I'm using the revit API to convert IFC objects also into native revit equivalents (including the IFC4 standard just released which has many improvements).

But the nice thing with IFC is the potential is there to use model in any software (Archicad, Digital Project, Bentley) and then structural, services and other analysis/simulation/design software.

Permalink Reply by Dresden on March 18, 2013 at 1:51pm

Anyway we can obtain a version of this plugin?

Thank You..

Permalink Reply by Ryan Gathmann on March 18, 2013 at 1:56pm

Dresden,

Unfortunately, I can't give away the files right now. However, if there was something in particular you where interested in, I would be more than happy to make videos or sample files that further explain what we did with it.

Permalink Reply by thoufiq ahmed on April 9, 2015 at 12:34am