Blender Advanced Massing
About
In the four hours of this class, we will look at generating a building massing with a tessellated skin. The process is broken down into four steps: building and refining the initial massing, “baking” the geometry, using the Tissue add-on to tesselate, and presenting the work.
Course done in collaboration with Middle East Architecture Lab’s Live Academy. Live Academy is an excellent platform for computational design knowledge with Blender, Grasshopper, Maya, Houdini, and others.
Also, advanced topological topics will be addressed and how specific edits could aid the process of subdivision modeling. By using loop cuts and sliding edges effectively, the base mash remains a light-weight editing cage to the more refined subdivision model.
In the first step, geometrical edits are generated through a simple mesh that progressively becomes refined. Subdivision and mirror modifiers are utilized as a semi non-destructive workflow to understand the overall composition of the massing.
Blender’s UI is flexible and could be modified to aid further in the design process by creating reference 3d viewports from specific angles to understand the massing adjustments. Customizing the user interface to this effect will be covered as part of this curriculum.
In the second step, the geometry is “baked” by applying all the modifiers and then separated into distinct parts for further design. A part of the tutorial will be about tessellation with Tissue, while glazing elements will be generated using the Wireframe modifier. To tessellate, a simple panel will be generated and shown how to use a panel-within-a-panel to create a further level of refinement.
As part of a building concept, we will also look at using Booleans to be able to quickly generate floor levels and ways to create a gap between facades and floorplates.
The final result remains parametric in the sense that panels could be adjusted and reapplied to the base mesh.
Below is a 20 minute first introduction of the course