Barry wrote:
Jose Gemez has posted something similar to this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCYtDqCwc80
It looks like each fin is straight so it could have been modelled as a series of slabs that are saved as objects and rotated to stand up.
That could have been done in any version of Archicad.
Otherwise complex profile walls would be the way to go with the shape of the fin being the profile and the length of the wall being the depth of the fin.
I think complex profiles became available in version 10?
Basically model it as it is built - like one of those plywood dinosaur kits.
Barry.
Okay that makes sense in terms of how you would actually build the individual slabs inside ArchiCAD, but it doesn't explain how you would align them to ensure that they form a structure with an overall smooth form and continuous curvature without jinks and the like.
It doesn't even explain how you would build the initial structure from which you derive those slabs.
The fins are a post-rationalized articulation of a form that had already been modeled with a smooth form and smooth curvature.They are not how the initial structure was built IT would be a painstaking process to model a structure like this from a scratch on the basis of those fins and slices and then try to work out how they fit together, rather than starting from what the overall finished form will look like and derive the fins from that.
Even those dinosaur kits you talk about I would imagine start from a complete form of what the finished dinosaur will be and then that gets sliced to produce the fins that form the kit.
It's not like they start modeling the final dinosaur from what the fins will look like. That would be nuts.
I think the second article provided by ricosta makes the most sense in terms of the software used.
I used to build stuff like that in grad aschool all the time and for fabrication and the workflow tended to be to buld your form in something like Maya or MAx using polygonal or Sub-Division modelling which allows a great deal of flexibility and then convert those forms into NURBS objects for export to Rhino3D which is what would allow us to fabricate the forms.
In Rhino we would then use a plugin like Grasshopper or just plain old Rhinoscriptiing to "slice" the forms into fabricatable fins that can be passed into a CNC router or a Laser cutter or even a 3D printer.
But that's a a workflow for small models. For a large project like this, I imagine it was all CNC routing of wood panels.segmented to fit your standard 5 axis router.
Incidentally I recently discovered that you could also conceivably achieve a project like this in SKetchup of all programs. Using the smooth and subdivide Ruby plugin to build the form and then another Ruby script called slicer to slice the form and lay the slices out to allow you to export the slices or fins as 2D flat shapes that can be CNC routed.
What I still don't get even with all this is where ArchiCAD fits into this workflow.
Even if we are to account for the new Maya (and Rhino3D) information, the article still mentions ArchiCAD.
Unless ArchiCAD was used to model the context and then the site was exported and used in Maya and Rhino to build the actual project and form.
