Elective (AR5953a) Assignment 1

Assignment 1 for the elective (A5953a) is due in Monday 24th January. You will be asked to prepare a 15 minute presentation, using slides and video captures of Houdini. You need to create an A3 landscape booklet documenting your presentation. The assignment is worth 50% of the grade for the elective.

The task for this assignment is to use Houdini to create a parametric model of  10,000 m2 of residential apartment building. The parametric model will be used to automate the developmental step in the IVP design process. The model does not need to be a detailed model, but should include structural frame,  lifts, stair cores, and individual apartment units. Elements like individual stair treads and furniture inside apartments do not need to be modeled (or if they are modeled, need to be highly simplified). When modelling elements like walls, they do not need to be modeled with thickness - a single surface will be sufficient.

You need to think about how to parametrise your model. For example, parameters may include the number of floors, the size of apartment, the floor to ceiling height, the depth of the balconies, the size of the windows, .... etc. Do not just try and maximise the number of parameters - instead, try and choose a small number of parameters that produce meaningful results.

In your presentation, do not focus on one final design. Instead, describe how your parametric model works and what types of design variants it can produce. In order to do this, you need to create a developmental diagram showing the relationship between parameters and design variants. This diagram should show a series of modelling steps, and should show how each step is affected by certain parameters.

Welcome

Welcome to the IVP studio. Here is a recap on what was handed out:

The aim of this studio is to develop an iterative design methodology that consists of creating parametric models and evaluating variants generated by these models. You will be required to use advanced digital tools to develop an optimized design proposal that explores the trade-offs between multiple and conflicting evaluation criteria.

The semester will be split into two parts:

·         Elective (AR5953a): “Tools and Techniques for IVP”

o        Week 1 to week 4: Mon, Wed and Thu afternoons
Total 12 afternoons.

o        Week 5: Assignment due, to be completed individually.

·         Studio: (AR4104): “IVP Studio”

o        Week 5 to week 12:  Mon, Wed and Thu afternoons
Total 24 afternoons.

o        Week 13: Final project due, to be completed in groups of three. All the students in the group will get the same grade.

For the elective, you will be introduced to the conceptual framework that is referred to as Iterative Virtual Prototyping. You will learn how to think about design in a new way. Rather than creating one design, you will be creating a digital process that is capable of automatically generating and evaluating large numbers of design variants. The main tool that you will use is called Houdini, developed by Sidefx. This tool is the most advanced procedural modeling tool that exists today, and you will be using it for both design development and design evaluation. You will also be linking to EnergyPlus and Radiance to run simulations of design performance.

For the studio, you will be working in groups of three, and you will sink or swim (or fly) as a group. You will be required to use the Iterative Virtual Prototyping methodology to develop a complex design proposal (site and brief yet to be determined). For the design, you will need to create a digital process that consists of both design development procedures and design evaluation procedures. For development, you need to explore how to parameterize your design ideas so that the right types of variants can be generated, and for evaluation, you need to identify key performance criteria that you would like to use for comparing design variants. At the final crit, you need to present the methodology used to arrive at the final design.

Final crit

The final crit is this Friday, 12th November. From our department, the staff will be Patrick Janssen, Cheah Kok Ming, Shinya Okuda, Huang Yi Chun. From the ETH group, the following people will be attending:

• Prof. Dr. Gerhard Schmitt
  http://www.arch.ethz.ch/~gschmitt/,  http://www.ia.arch.ethz.ch/
• Dr. Stefan Mueller
  http://www.arch.ethz.ch/~stefanmu/web/
• Gideon Aschwande (PhD candidate)

The crit will be taking place in Vis Lab (2nd floor, direclty opposite the Lift). A projector has been arranged.

• You need to pin up our drawings on Thursday 5pm in the DTS studio, 
• You need to move the boards to the Vis Lab on Friday morning using the lift. 
• You need to test your presentations on Friday morning so that we do not have technical problems during the presentation.
• You need to plan your presentation so that each member of the group participates in some way in the presentation.
• The final presentation will start at 2pm. You must all be present for all presentations. Each group will have a maximum of one hour for presentation and questions. However, I would suggest to keep the presentation short - maybe 20 minutes. Then we have about half an hour for discussion.

Crit list as follows:

1. Li Ran, Ye Hanyu
2. Yu Xiao Xuan, An Aram, Wang Bin
3. Nittin, Venkat, Vignesh
4. Chen Zengyuan, Lee Sian Chyun, Hui Tung Sing

Crit

The next crit has been moved back a few days - it will be on Wed 3rd November. For this crit, the focus is the simulations. We want to see iterative experiments, with simulation results. In order to be able to run the simulations, you will of course first need to have well defined building forms.

Food and drinks

Please remember that food and drinks are not allowed in the computer rooms. This is becoming a real problem lately - so eat your food outside, and keep the lab tidy and clean.

Agents

The agent group has found that using the DOP network is very slow. I have created a different method of setting up agent simulations that uses only SOP networks and it seems a lot faster (I have not tested the difference in speed yet). The way it works is that at each frame, you store (i.e. save in memory) some attributes for your geometry - usually this will be the position of the points (but may also include some other attributes if needed). These attributes can then be retrieved in the next frame, so that the agents can start from where they stopped in the previous frame.

Here are the nodes:

• phtj agents - has a 'store' and 'retrieve' nodes, for storing and retrieving attributes.

And here is an example file using these node:

• Example agents - some simple agent behaviours

Interim crit

Interim crit will be next Thursday - 21st October. All groups should have:

• their developmental diagram
• the houdini model of that diagram
• variants produced using the houdini model

The variants should be situated on the site. Use the site model to place the variants within the site context..

Each group should print 3 A1 presentation panels (minimum - more is also ok). Please also show your previous three panels from the last crit as well.