Parametric Factory stories: Dynamic Panel by Jorge Beneitez

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Dear Community members,

Earlier this year, we hosted the Parametric Object Factory challenge, and in response, we received several outstanding projects shared with the community. If you missed the challenge’s highlights, click here to see the selected submissions in one spot.

Curious about the journey behind the final submissions? We’re excited to share the stories of the Parametric Object Factory’s winning entries. Our next guest is Jorge Beneitez, with Enzyme’s Dynamic Panel. This winning submission is available at weareenzyme.com, if you want to try it yourself.

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At the end of this post, you can find other submitted objects available for download. A big thank you goes to Jorge for sharing his team’s story behind this project and to the other challenge participants for sharing their work with the global community.

Now, it’s time to hear from Jorge!

Dynamic Panel Outline

Hi, my name is Jorge Beneitez, and I am the managing director of enzyme APD, an architectural design studio with offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Madrid. We specialize in Master Planning and Architectural Design, and our projects extend worldwide.

Since the inception of the company, we have been interested in pushing the boundaries of the technology applied to the AEC industry and, more specifically, to the design stages, where it seemed that offices were struggling to implement all sorts of BIM, Digital, and Computational workflows that could lead to a better outcome, improved design capabilities, streamlined production methods, reduction of errors, and time spent.

All these benefits mean a win-win for both the clients and the practices that usually struggle with the efficiency and profitability of their work. We wondered why everyone wasn’t doing the same thing as us…

It turns out that mastering these new tools, training the teams, and buying and maintaining the required software is hard for most companies that usually struggle with short-term cashflows and very short deadlines.

Following the values of innovation, efficiency, and design flexibility, enzyme started its days using Archicad to retain control over the design process and streamline the architectural practice’s workflow, resulting in many successful collaborations with incredible partners worldwide and participating in hundreds of projects. Archicad fits perfectly with the architectural mentality and problem-solving, helping to achieve impressive results faster and with less hassle.

But the world of architecture was changing fast, and Archicad was lacking computational design and automation capabilities that we were ready to explore. And this is when we found Rhino and Grasshopper.

Rhino is one of the best 3D modeling tools for precisely defining complex surfaces, and with it comes Grasshopper. This visual programming language allows you to iterate hundreds of designs and solve complex problems by creating simple algorithms in the form of connected nodes. Each node represents an action, like a building block, in a larger puzzle. Anyone can easily create their logic and geometries with dependencies to parameters we can set, corresponding to anything.

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One of Archicad’s strengths is its ability to talk to other software solutions – in other words, its interoperability - and around that same time, Graphisoft came up with a concept to integrate Rhino/Grasshopper using a live connection, bringing all the Archicad design tools as Grasshopper nodes that could control the parameters of these elements in Archicad from the parametric interface that Grasshopper offers. You could set a dependency, for example, for the size of a window, depending on how much light a particular façade receives throughout the day.

The more we used Grasshopper, the more we wanted to integrate this solution with Archicad. But there were specific designs that, due to the nature of the Archicad elements themselves, were hard to translate to native BIM geometry. We were forced to send them to Archicad as Morphs or static objects, losing control over its parametric capacities and the 2D parametric representation that makes it so good at producing beautiful architectural drawings.

This was when we came up with the idea of creating GDL objects that could be governed parametrically from Grasshopper while retaining the flexibility of proper BIM elements with parametric controls inside Archicad.

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Even though the Archicad native tools can easily represent most common building elements, we’ve always had ideas about improving our favorite tools. This became possible with the help of a GDL wizard: Grzeg Wilk, a Polish architect and programmer with whom we started collaborating three years ago.

One of my obsessions has been bringing to Archicad not very complex geometry but procedural capabilities on the application of surface materials and colors. In Grasshopper, the parametric application of color is based on gradients or the random application of a color range, or at times based on physical constraints like height or size. With the use of the live connection, this was partially possible. Still, based on a set of pre-existing materials, you had to manually create these color gradients or ranges before being able to assign them to the elements. But imagine hundreds of assorted colors! The task is daunting, and these materials are hard-coded, which means that if the criteria change, then they need to be redone. It didn’t seem too aligned with the idea of the computational design we had in mind.

In this context, we designed the dynamic panel object to recreate any type of planar tiling geometry, like curtain walls systems, facade claddings, stone or ceramic tiles, ceiling panels, etc., that could be shaped in any polygon, and that could bring any color into Archicad.

Doing some research on existing objects by Dániel Kovács and Jaime Ingram and inspired by an article by Pavlo Menshykh, we implemented a system that could parametrically generate surface materials based on RGB values and transparency. Instead of appearing on your file attributes, potentially adding hundreds of new surface materials, the materials would be self-contained, completely defined parametrically, with values that could still be accessible via scheduling GDL parameters.

After meeting these basic requirements, we started to add other functionalities. We included the capability to generate dynamic composites (controlled by Grasshopper) and levels of detail controlled via Model View Options. This subframe structure enables the object to double up as a parametric screen object, a planarity check algorithm, and the ability to create Archicad schedules showing the actual dimension of each panel by projecting each of them flat in the XY plane, adding automatic dimensions, ID tags and deep controls for the correct 2D visualization in plans and other documents.

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Lastly, we created a sleek object interface that allows editing any of the parameters from within Archicad, so non-Grasshopper users can interact with it and tweak it for documentation purposes.

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After successfully implementing this object in several projects, we have explored many other objects with similar capabilities, solving slightly different shortcomings from the existing tools since we realized that with some GDL you can get far — even as far as creating your tools! This has allowed us to develop innovative ideas and workflows that improve our productivity and streamline the data flow between our two favorite software solutions.

Don’t hesitate to reach out for help or collaboration, these computational methods can dramatically improve how your projects are handled, and GDL is the perfect partner to team up with Grasshopper.

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Thank you to our community of Archicad users for sharing their stories and work. Click here to read our previous Parametric Factory story: Lego, by Lorenzo Ferla.

We also invite you to download and try out the following objects made publicly available by the Parametric Object Factory challenge participants. There are a few that are sure to come in handy for your projects!