CODE3100 Design Studio — Building Information Modelling
Day 22: MON 20 MAR 2017 — Day 28: SUN 26 MAR 2017
What is Flux Dashboard?
Flux Dashboard can be seen as both a presentation tool and a design tool used between various people to work on the same project. Real-time data can be linked to and from Flux Dashboard to other software packages that are compatible between each other to control the resulting geometry and information which can be stored between multiple software packages.
Therefore, I am eager to see this through by understanding how this application works. To see it’s successes and faults, as well as the possible outcome of it in action when applied to the Pavilion group project.
Here is what I’ve done so far:
I wanted to see if I could understand Flux Dashboard as a tool to manipulate/control the input of numbers (using sliders to control the width / length / height of a cube between 2 scenarios:
- Dynamo + Flux
- Grasshopper and Flux
The first thing I did was follow the tutorial on Dynamo to Flux, which allowed me to create a cube in Dynamo and transfer that geometry to flux via the “Send to Flux” node. However, this meant that when I set up the dashboard with the project, I could only control the width / length / height through Dynamo (which would then update in real-time onto Flux Dashboard).
For this reason I did a little bit of searching and found that in order to interconnect the control input, I needed to include a ‘control slider’ from the tools available to be added into the dashboard panel:
From here I could see the input of the numbers for the width / length / height of the cube from Dynamo, as shown below:
Again, this meant that I was unable to control the W/L/H of the cube through Dashboard.
This is the original attempt at the script:
Interestingly, the numbers for the dimensions of the cube in Flux Dashboard updated at the same time the geometry (the first time I did it). But I didn’t get a chance to record that. Instead, this is the result of adjusting the parameters in Dynamo and seeing only the geometry change in Flux.
After a bit of research, I stumbled upon this post on the Flux forum:
https://community.flux.io/questions/3295/how-to-set-up-a-revit-geometry-for-its-parameters.html
Using this forum post as a guide (because there aren’t any real tutorials that I’ve found to follow through), I managed to figure out and understand the logic behind the interconnected nodes and therefore was able to successfully control the dimensions of this cube through Flux Dashboard when connected through Dynamo.
This is the resulting script:
This is the resulting Dynamo > Flux > Dynamo Workflow:
This process worked really well in Dynamo. But I also wanted to consider using Grasshopper/Rhino because this is a software most likely to be used in the digital fabrication and digital making groups.
So I therefore attempted to connect Grasshopper to Flux using this tutorial:
From looking into this exercise, I realise that the logic of the node connections are relatively the same. So I tested this theory by creating a rectangle in grasshopper and extruding it. The x and y values as well as the z axis number input are the three variables that are to be changed in Flux Dashboard / Grasshopper.
Below is the result:
From this experiment, Grasshopper revealed to have problems loading this data through to Flux. As seen above, Grasshopper was crashing and nothing loaded in Flux. However, that could be because of the way that I created the script, which was by using the cuboid node (in Dynamo) and creating an extruded rectangle (in Grasshopper).
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For this reason, I know I’ll definitely need to experiment more with these workflows — but more importantly try generating more complex systems (of geometry) so that it could be more relevant to creating a form for the pavilion, but also develop it further to be documented for fabrication.
Another idea I think would be interesting to look into is how multiple people would come together using different software packages into the one Flux Dashboard space. I have yet to test this.
Overall, I believe using the Flux Dashboard workflow will definitely be an interesting way to collaborate between all members across all groups.
Research into Dynamo Packages:
Questions:
Screenshots of dynamo scripts
Interesting nodes in the package + what do they do?
Did they work? Yes/No. What did you try to get it to work? Did that work? Show the work.
Did you discover something unexpected?
How do you think this could be applied to the Pavilion?
Clockwork
Is a collection of custom nodes (330+) for Dynamo, many of which are Revit-related. The rest fall in the category of:
- List management
- Mathematical operations
- String operations
- Unit conversions
- Geometric operations (mainly bounding boxes, meshes, planes, points, surfaces, UVs and vectors
- Panelling
Rhythm
Is also collection of custom nodes for Dynamo (80+ custom nodes)
“ It primarily consists of out of the box Dynamo nodes used in clever ways as they apply to the Revit environment.”
During our overall group collaborative meeting, many ideas were thrown around. Here’s one I thought up of during the BIM group discussion:
The idea behind this was the combine the idea of stress within one sculpture as a centrepiece. This idea was in part of the first ideas on arrangement of “pods” so that it would arch around a communal space. The sculpture itself would sit centre to that and be embodied with QR codes. These themselves would be attached to the material of the sculpture (whether it be fabric or a solid piece block with stuck on QR code stickers).
But the idea would still be the same in that the QR codes would be connected to mobile AR. When viewed using a mobile, plants/leaves or any organic form will emerge from the code.
Hence, Chaos (QR Codes) to Calm (Nature) is embodied within the one sculpture.
Further on during the overall group discussion, ideas started to become clearer and realisations emerged. Below is the table I scribed together from everyone’s input showing the concept of “The Stages of Human Stress Reaction”:
