Welcome to our series of articles from the Snow Globe Challenge!
We invited some of the designers who participated in the challenge to elaborate on their entries, share their workflows and tips&tricks.
Enjoy and feel free to drop us a comment if you have any questions.
Now passing the mic to Heimo Mooslechner!
A snowball to push boundaries
When I read about the Snowball Challenge, I first thought, "What's the point of THAT now?", but in this time, with the limitations of personal freedom due to a not really tangible disease, man has more time than before. So I let myself be persuaded by my inner demons and angels to participate.
At first I thought of a completely different design than the one I finally decided on. But the idea of Buckminster Fuller and his "geodesic dome" came to me very early. The first drafts looked more like this:
Of course, I wasn't really satisfied with that and let the matter rest for the time being.
I have to say in advance that I had dealt with the "geodesic dome" of Buckminster Fuller much earlier.
In 2013 I created some Youtube tutorials to realize something like that with the means I had at that time. Later, when I could access Rhinoceros I tried something like that with it, too.
I like challenges, I like to find solutions by "thinking around the corner". Archicad is not the best tool to create such a dome, but it already worked with Archicad 16. Thus, I imported this dome into Archicad 25 and experimented with it.
In the fall I had worked intensively with GDL and its possibilities to create different arch shapes for doors and windows in a GDL library element - all with the goal to make it adjustable simply with a handle, without having to switch into the dialog boxes of the element.
Naturally, I had the idea to put this one door study object under the dome and switch all its possibilities, so that everybody could see the possibilities collected in one file immediately:
The object calculates coordinate points along the arcs and passes them to a Tube command, which then accesses the Profile Manager profiles. I thought this would be a nice little Christmas present for the audience of our colleagues who might be interested in it. That's why I linked it for download on the contest page just below my globe's picture.
Similarly, here are the stars. I had previously programmed this GDL for a post on the Developer forum - but only for a 2D star.
Because the mathematical preparatory work for a 3D star was already done, I made a 3D star with the same functions - again with handles for setting the necessary parameters. As a small "style
break" I thought that it would not be wrong to set only 5 arms instead of the division into 6, which is normally inherent to snowflakes, but no one will have recognized this.
I placed the stars with "gravity on shell" on an irregular surface, duplicated this "cloud" a few times and put this swarm of stars into the dome.
The snowman consists of simple spherical GDLs, which I had placed a little offset and off-center on top of each other, and other simple GDL shapes.
Then, to get a better (and faster) rendering when the "work" was done, I exported the geometry to Twinmotion, set the season there to "winter", added some environment elements, got the sun almost to the horizon, found a suitable viewpoint, and made the image for the contest.
After that I tried to make the round flight video in Twinmotion and was surprised myself how good the glitter of the faceted surface of the dome looks in the video:
It was fun. It didn't take too much time now. Of course, you can't add the time for programming the door and the star, which is more like "working months", not hours, but this time was spent for another purpose. Also the production of the "geodesic dome" needed time, but this happened already a long time ago.
What did I want to achieve with it?
Eternal fame in the worship halls of Graphisoft - users of course - smile.
If you liked it, then take part in something like this next time. You learn things about Archicad that are not part of your everyday work, but can be used there. Besides, it is fun - at least for me.
With this I close my short essay on this topic and wish you a successful 2022.
Get to know Heimo Mooslechner:
He is a teacher at HTBLuVA Salzburg, federal teaching and research institute in Salzburg, Austria. He teaches bricklaying, formworks, working-safety and, of course, Archicad.
Heimo enjoys spending good part of his free time in Archicad/GDL forums, or on all kinds of kite-sports - on water and snow - and intuitive fast-archery as you can find in his Youtube videos linked below.
Location:
Salzburg, Austria
Connections:
Heimo Mooslechner's Youtube channel, where you can find plenty of Archicad tutorials;
You can often find him on Graphisoft Germany Archicad forum for AC tutorials and GDL;
Check out Heimo's BIMcomponents page for sophisticated GDL objects;
Or you can be friends on Facebook 🙂
Check out our series of articles about the Snow Globe designs
Snowy Pasargad Snow Globe by Sepideh Kolahi
Christmas In Space Snow Globe by Kamen Nikolov
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