How to model this impossible blob facade in archicad or..

[Anonymous]

Dear Forum readers,

A fellow student and i are working on this project for school. We are having diffuclties modeling this particular shape. The whole facade is made of Proflit( U shaped glass and placed horizontaly all over the facade) and each Profilit glass has a different diffused color.

Profilit example:
http://hragvartanian.files.wordpress.com/2007/06/700-steven-holl-nama-night-2.jpg?w=700&h=519

We have enclosed a sketch of our desired shape for our project. We have no clue in how to model this shape, a specially because its build out of horizontally placed glass. Wich is curved and placed randomly.(as seen on the closes facade in the sketch, this should be all over the building).

Sketch:


So far we have found out that making the shape in 3ds max and exporting it to archicad could work, however we havent found a way to make the model out of horizontal glas beams that are curved.

Any help would be gratefull, as we are very stuck right now. We both are using archicad 15.

Thank you in advance,

[Arcadia]

My best tip is to design something sensible:)

I don't fully understand your description of the facade system but I suspect you might have to model and place each piece of glass seperately with complex profiles. This will be painful and time consuming. Maybe the "objectiv" 3rd party add-in can help?

[Karl Ottenstein]

Being a student project, is close-enough for a schematic design good enough? Or do you need construction-level perfection?

If it can just be quite close for the conceptual design, then here are a few ideas.

If you only need rendered images and not linework, just model the mass (with shell tool or profiled walls/solid element ops) and assign a custom material to the faces that need the random-stacked translucent material.

To actually model it, consider using the add-on Trussmaker, which lets you draw lines in elevation which then become 3D masses. Draw lines that correspond to the joints between between the glass panels. Set Trussmaker to convert these lines to the width/height of the desired spacing, and a depth greater than the wall depth.

After this special grid mass is created, push it into a copy of the wall and do a Solid Element intersect operation to get a mass that follows the shape/curve of the wall and the wall thickness.

Another solid element op would subtract the grid from the wall, leaving the individual glass panels (to be used in Artlantis next).

Assigning individual colors to the panels would be hard (impossible?) in ArchiCAD. In Artlantis (there is a free student license), you can re-assign materials on a polygon basis. So, you can just click panel to panel to assign new materials in Artlantis and then set the colors as desired.

All I can think of on an empty stomach... 😉

Cheers,
Karl

[Anonymous]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gqecc67IeSI&list=UUdLO32fbERCUBoEgH5OX--w&index=3&feature=plcp
Maybe with this little tutorial and time...

[Marky]

Jose wrote:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gqecc67IeSI&list=UUdLO32fbERCUBoEgH5OX--w&index=3&feature=plcp
Maybe with this little tutorial and time...

Wow!

This is great stuff!
Never expected to sculpture with the Curtain Wall like that. And additionally to use the Shell in such a creative way.
Very inspiring Jose!

Thanks,
Marek