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denCity

April 19, 2009, 9:26 am
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denCity is a Masters level research project by Sahra (Peter Sovinc, Saif Almasri, Suryansh Chandra) at the Design Research Lab, Architectural Association, London.

denCity is a critique of modern day urbanization and city planning methodologies that are based on 20-year masterplans of linear city growth and are incapable of dealing with the pace of change of modern economic landscapes, societal conditions and life styles. It researches new interactive systems of master planning and urban design, that are capable of coping with completely different economic scenarios within a matter of seconds, producing relevant FAR and height regulation maps, programmatic distribution information and street networks.
At the architectural scale, denCity critiques modern day urbanization that is shaped by an assumed unending abundance of energy sources and the short sighted reliance on private vehicular transportation. The research is focussed on developing super high density 20 FAR pedestrian ladscapes and addressing issues of natural light penetration and ground association observed in contemporary high density cities.

Below is the online version of the final project with voice over:

Part 1/2



Part 2/2


Please feel free to leave you feedback/suggestions/etc.
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Urban Programmatic Distribution System - The 3d version

April 23, 2009, 7:14 am
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This video is an earlier version of the Urban Distribution System that was finally used in denCity. This version could do a 3d representation of the FAR & height maps which made better eye-candy, but didn't have features like the coastline change, pedestrian walkability zones, street patterns, etc. that was finally coded into the final version. It ultimately became so complicated and processing intensive that we had to discard the 3d ability just for the sake of sanity.

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The Lightbox - Art Fund Pavilion Competition

April 26, 2009, 11:48 am
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This is our (Saif Almasri, Suryansh Chandra) entry for the recent Art Fund Pavilion competition. It was quite a thing to shift to a 35 square metre pavilion after doing a 12 square kilometer city, but then the difference was also 3 days of rapidfire design over 16 months of intensive exploration and research. The brief was to cater to the following requirements:
  1. The pavilion was to be assemblable within 72 hours,
  2. The only material to use was 18mm or 25mm thick plywood. With cables/nuts/bolts/etc. for joinery,
  3. The pavilion needed to be collapsed, transported in its compact form, and reassembled in another location (for exhibitions, etc.),
  4. It needed to accommodate 30 sitting people in a presentation scenario with wall mounting space for A0 panels; accommodate 6 shelf display units and 4 floor standing display units for an exhibition scenario; and covert to an informal gathering space for a party scenario.
Having experienced the design and construction of the DRL 10 pavilion which took over a month to construct, we knew that having several different sectional profiles that needed to assembled together in a particular sequence was not going to work with the 72 hour deadline – it was way too complex and confusing for people on site just to figure out the sequencing right, let alone the assembly.

So we set up one of our primary objective to having the least possible variety of sections: something like standardized lego blocks of the same size so there is no confusion of which piece goes where – all pieces are 4 standard sizes, anyone can go anywhere as long as they are the same size. This, in my opinion is a very useful application of parametric design techniques where top-down form generation meets bottom-up component assembly logic – parametrics working towards minimizing costs and assembly times.





This system was setup in Rhino+Grasshopper in which we controlled the entire form with just 5 splines, and the computational system always maintained lengths and assembly constraints and provided the closest matching form. The final form consisted of 50 sectional profiles, each made up of 4 different sizes of members connected in the same sequence.

The final design was made up of 4 different sizes of members, linked up in series with hinged joints, which makes them collapsible into a very small size. The planned assembly was as follows:
  1. All 50 sets of sectional profiles will be assembled off-site as they are being CNC milled.
  2. All these profiles will easily fit in a mini-truck in their collapsed state, and transported to site.
  3. The profiles will be placed next to each other and the joints secured by running cables through them.
  4. The profiles will be opened up from their collapsed state, tuning the hinged joints until the final shape is achieved.
The seating was designed in the same manner with 2 different sizes of components. Due to the flexibility of a hinged joint, the seating was designed to be easily adjustable to become a bar counter in a party scenario or a display unit in the exhibition scenario.



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algorithmic Play+

October 18, 2011, 1:21 pm
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As a part of the co|de group at ZHA, I've spent a significant amount of time in the past couple of years exploring  algorithm based form finding. Here's just a short quick compilation of some of the things I've been upto.








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Fabrication Oriented Parametrics

October 18, 2011, 4:29 pm
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I was recently invited to the city of Changsha, China to conduct a 2 week workshop with Architecture students from Hunan University and also build a pavilion within certain cost/size/material/fabrication/time constraints. We were 3 tutors: Yu Du (Zaha Hadid Beijing), Shuojoing Zhang (UN Studio Shanghai) and myself, along with support from the Hunan University staff. This post is a documentation of what we built and how we got there.

Conceptual Design

The design brief was to design a pavilion outside the main DAL (Digital Architecture Lab) studio space with some seating within volume constrains of 6m x 3m x 3m, but mostly act as a sculptural piece that demonstrates a parametric design-to-fabrication process. The form we came up with was a single sculputral doubly curved surface that formed seating and a notional canopy.

Initial shape making: some exercises in basic aesthetics







Panellization

Once the base surface was frozen, a series of panellization exercises followed with the constants being that the in-house laser cutters were the only fabrication technique available, and plywood would be the most feasible material to procure and fabricate. So keeping in mind that planar panels out of plywood was the only way to go, we zeroed in on skewed hexagonal panels that formed gaps between them everytime the curvature was too high.


Flattening the panels achieved dual objectives: easier fabrication and a porous structure










Custom Detailing

Figuring out the panellization is one thing, figuring out how they're suspended in space is quite another. It was decided that the panels would be held by a triangular meshed network of thin steel cables, which in turn would be supported by laser cut wooden profiles fixed to a steel frame -- so far so good. Now came the part where we had to manage to fix panels to this cable network with a joint that allowed flexibility to move/rotate panels in all 3 axes. We 'invented' a custom detail that did exactly this:

Prototypes of the 'flower detail' being tested


The elongated slots in the plywood panels allowed transverse movement, while the circular slots in the steel discs allowed for lateral movement. Each hexagonal panel was to be fixed at 3 alternating corners, forming the 'plane' of that panel. Based on this information, three elongated slots were modelled into each panel and a numbering sequence was deviced to minimize chaos during fabrication. The production of laser cut drawing was automated from the model, so the script laid out the panels in an orderly manner which made it easy to stock them after they were cut.

Generating a fool-proof numbering sequence in a hex-grid is tricky




Fabrication Optimization

The laser cutters that we were working with had a bit of a problem: they were exceptionally slow at cutting curves, and even if we gave them segmented polylines, they would take a significant amount of time stopping at each junction and starting on the new segment. While the panels were all straight lines, the text became the killer. So we ended up inventing our own font that minimized the number of turns it takes to write a number, and obviously there were no curves. It's not the prettiest, but it saved about five minutes of laser cut time per panel, and there were 650 panels in total.


The machine friendly font setup in Grasshopper

The most labour intensive task in the entire assembly process was that of getting the cable mesh right. Cables ran in 3 direction (being a triangular grid), but each length segment on every cable was different. All our coding expertise could only go so far as to automatically generating excel files in correct sequence marking each cable name and segment length. We color coded and tagged each direction differently, but that only helped to some degree.

Patterns in numbers: a screenshot of the excel file containing cable lengths.

The cables had to be manually marked, cut and piled, and then clamped to the structure. The photos below should illustrate what a process this was.
A carpenter making post-it tags from the excel files


The good ol' T-square. Cables being measured and tagged


Nobody wanted to be the one unrolling this back into straight lengths.


So far so clean: adding alternate cables in 1 direction looks fairly clean and simple


But it starts getting complicated fairly quickly


Reaching a point of near-incomprehensibility when done




 The single biggest lesson learnt during the cabling process was to never repeat such an elaborate 'every-length-is-unique' setup, and adapt quickly to the skill of the workmen working on it. Finally, below's a slide show of the completed canopy.


Here's some sequential shots of the fabrication process.
Construction Sequence 1: Never assumes the walls to be vertical


Construction Sequence 2: Never assume the ground to be horizontal

There's also a short video of the Rhino+Grasshopper setup that generated all the final design geometry and construction data:


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Mirror, Mirror on the Wall...

November 17, 2011, 8:31 am
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This post errs on the technical side of coding. There's many language related questions that often get asked around, but this post attempts to answer one of them:


"...which is the fastest of them all?"


The idea was initially tossed at me by Shajay Bhooshan and Mostafa El-Sayed at ZHA Co|de: to test the time taken to make 1 million random mesh cubes. We further refined it into 1, 3, 6, 12 and 24 million mesh faces, and we developed 2 ways of doing the same thing. The Spontaneous Array meant that sets of 4 random points and 1face would be computed and added to the mesh immediately, while the Ordered Array would generate all points and store them in an array first, and then append them all in one shot to the mesh and then generate the faces. I tried to be scientific about it, and here's the results:

*all times are best of 4 runs. Note that Rhino4 is 32-bit only.


Observations:
  1. In the defense of Rhino 4, may I add that the proceedure that adds geometry to viewport also seems handle the viewport redrawing. So all Rhino 4 solvingTimes add in the time taken to re-draw viewport. This seems to have improved in Rhino 5, where  adding geometry to the session and drawing it seem to have been split into seperate proceedures. This was easily noticeable when Grasshopper would become responsive and publish solvingTimes in Rhino 5 while viewports were still being drawn. But in Rhino 4, everything was solved and drawn first, and only then did anything start responding again. Yes Rhino 4 did run out memory and crash twice.
  2. The ordered and spontaneous arrays don't seem to affect Rhino 5 much, but they seem to affect Rhino 4 where the ordered arrays almost always seem to be faster by about 5%.
  3. This is not scientific, but on most runs C# seems to achieve its best time on the first run while VB does it in the 2nd or 3rd (almost never the 1st). And C# did seem very slightly marginally faster as array sizes grew.



Disclaimers:
My home ground is VB.NET. So it is highly likely that code I wrote in VB.NET is very optimized, while in C# a bit less so (less likely because it's nearly a direct translation of VB code) and very poorly written in Python (which is likely because I haven't worked too heavily on Python). It's a Grasshopper 0.80052 definition, and uses Giulio Piacentino'sPython component for Grasshopper.


The Grasshopper definition can be downloaded here.

Update: Added in the Maya 2011 times as well, courtesy: Shajay & Mostafa.
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Curved Folding Paper

November 28, 2012, 11:25 am
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I was recently involved in a 2-day workshop with Ankon Mitra in New Delhi, India, exploring curved folding as a means of lending structural stiffness to paper. After having worked on the ZHA Venice Biennale installation with the rest of the ZHA Code Group, I was keen on taking the idea further and Ankon, having extensively worked with Origami tessellations and straight-line folding for several years, was an excellent person to have on board with all his experience and expertise. A really big thanks to him for organizing this and getting everything together on such short notice, the hosts, Amit and Monika Gulati, and all the participants for making this happen.

Being an intensive 2-day workshop, the first day involved developing an intuitive understanding of material behaviour and basic thumb-rule principles of curved folding. Participants started with folding some known tessellation patterns by Jeannine Mosely, Andrea Russo and Richard Sweeney, and then went on to draw up their own patterns, learning what could fold and what could not. The first half of day-2 involved folding hypars (hyperbolic paraboloids) and corrupting, distorting and modifying them to create derivatives and satiate curiosity of what will or will not fold. Below is a small selection of the work done by the participants.



The second half of day-2 involved collectively making a 5 feet tall installation out of 210gsm (ivory) card paper to test if curved folding was strong enough to make it stand with such thin paper. The design process (illustrated below) started with a dodecahedron whose faces were further subdivided into smaller pentagons and planarized. The entire process of evolution is best explained by the illustration below:



This process gave us developable surfaces that were flattened into 6 modules and mass produced by a combination of hand cutting and using a digital vinyl cutter. Each of these building blocks was hand folded and stuck together using thin strips of paper as backing-plates and ordinary glue. Below an image sequence and time-lapse video of the assembly process.



I have to admit that before we started assembly, I was quite nervous if it this would stand: I was expecting the cap to collapse towards the centre like a bean-bag. But much to our amusement, not only did it stand, it was decently resilient to bending and external forces.



Having completed this and being pleasantly surprised by how well paper behaved, now I almost wish we had made this out of ordinary copier paper. Perhaps in some ways, I secretly did want to find the point where it would fail :)
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Curved Folding | Metal Twins

August 11, 2013, 11:52 am
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Continuing the lineage of research on Curved Folding, the AA Visiting School Bangalore series titled HyperThreads explored the subject over an intense 10-day workshop in 2012. Some very cool student projects, a lot of good energy, and finally two super-nice folded aluminium sculptures.

Credits:

ZHA: Shajay Bhooshan, Mustafa El Sayed, John Klein
Sasaki & Partners: Chikara Inamura
Populous: Alicia Nahmad
AA DRL: Shilpa Pattar

and the hosts InFORM Architects and InCITE gallery, Bangalore.


The finished sculptures.


Student work: corrupting known Origami tesselations.


Student work: curved folds as structural stiffeners.


Student work: curved folds as structural stiffeners.



Student work: the elegant simplicity of 3 curved folds on a sheet of paper.


Algorithmic method to setup a pipeline with which we could design.

Process video: Convex polygons to developable surfaces.


Design to Production: 15 sheets of aluminium, 3 hours of laser cutting.


Stability: Check.


1am in the studio, and we begin assembly.

Hand foldability: Check.


Hand-folded panels. Simple assembly tools: spanners and screw-drivers.


The first piece coming together.


The tricky last bits: fitting the last screws.


Finished pieces.


Paper models | Metal cousins.

Curvature continuity: Check.

 More eye-candy :)


The team, minus a few.


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Building with Earth | Thin Shell Structures

August 30, 2013, 8:13 am
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AA Visiting School Lyon, Synchronised Movements 2013: A 10-day design-build workshop exploring a collaboration between digital design methods + workflows and the hands-on nature of building with earth. More details: http://lyon.aaschool.ac.uk/. This was the first of an annual series of workshops, that will contribute to furthering the research agenda every year. It's held at the Les Grands Ateliers in Villefontaine, France, which also hosts the CRATerre festival of Earthen Architecture at the same time as the workshop.

The image series below documents the design + fabrication process of a thin-shell structure built during the workshop using principles of catenary arches and minimal surfaces. There wasn't a feasible way of precisely controlling thickness: it varies from 5-10mm and its built using 4 layers of earth with two layers of loosely woven jute as reinforcement.

Credits:
Architectural Association | Christopher Pierce, Priji Balakrishnan
Zaha Hadid Architects | Marie-Perrine Plaçais, Suryansh Chandra
Stéphanie Chaltiel Architecture | Stéphanie Chaltiel
Chiara Pozzi Architecture | Chiara Pozzi
Morphogenesism | Zubin Khabazi
Les Grands Ateliers | Patrice Doat
Grenoble School of Architecture | Philipe Liveneau

Design Iterations: Mostly dictated by the size limits of the CNC machine and our ambitions.

Design Process: Polygon to CNC millable pieces

Fabrication Data for Machine: Nested in sheets and labelled

Fabrication Data for Human: Assembling the shell one pizza slice at a time.

The Machine: doing its thing..

The Machine: did its thing.

The Humans: doing their thing. Some of the other tests and structures that we built during the workshop are lying all around..

Assembly complete.

Time for Fabric: This fabric is the main formwork on which the earth will be applied. The plywood is just so the fabric can take the correct shape.

One Pizza Slice at a Time: Don't go by the laughing faces, it took some serious pulling to get the fabric taut.

Undo: Going wrong meant painstakingly ripping the fabric and removing the pins.

Fabric complete.

Putting the pizza together: Each slice was assembled separately, so it took clamping/bolting to bring the shell together

Brace: The fabric was so taut that it was pulling the arches too far in.

Braced: All braces in place keeping the arches vertical. The first coat on the fabric is a stiffener, and it also makes the surface fairly rough. This helps earth stick a lot better.

Indiglo: the stiffener coat is almost complete. Halogen lamps were put inside to expedite the drying process.

Hands-on: Marie-Perrine applying the first coat of earth..

Tactile process: using hands to apply earth has a sculptor-like quality due to its tactility - a rare quality in an increasingly digital world.



First layer of earth complete.

The oven: Drying time was a big factor in a 10-day workshop with rainy weather. An army of halogen lamps and plywood sheets were used to turn the entire shell into an oven. In an ideal world one could be more eco-friendly given more time and less rain.

Coat 2 begins..

Nasty Edges: Chiara ensuring the edges get enough earth. Due to the design and planarity constraints, the edges often got too narrow to be able to apply earth properly. 

Coat 3

The Sag: As more coats were applied, previously dried up coats would also soak some moisture and get soft. This led to a bit of sagging and the inner arches became clearly perceptible on the outside.

The Sag: the increasing weight of earth with each coat was starting to get concerning.

Demoulding Begins: First to remove all the fabric..

Demoulding: the pizza slices seem to hold without the fabric..

Arches Off: The first external arch comes off, and for the first time we perceive how thin the shell really is.

All Arches Off: All 4 external arches are out, only the 5 inside remain - those are the real challenge.

The Show: Quite an audience is starting to gather, as eager as us. Whether this stands or crumbles, this is going to be quite a show. Other structures we built also visible around.

Demoulding: Removing the inner arches was extremely tricky because they locked each other like keystones, and the shell had sagged around them, further locking them in place.

Hacksaws and Brute Force: All kinds of crazy ideas were on the table to get these off.

Twist, Rotate, Push, Pull: After some serious cajoling, the inner arches were starting to come off.
The Smiles and the Wonder: The last half-arch remains and its almost certain that the shell is standing on its own :)

Its Off: We take the last arch out and run.. in case it comes down.

It Stands: The finish of the edges leaves much to be desired, and could even be fixed after demoulding but this was the last day of the workshop and we were out of time.



Pride: The structure hosted the convocation ceremony of the workshop.





Unfortunately, the shell didn't have too long a life: it needed to be moved in order to make room for other activities, and didn't survive the lateral loads imposed by the move. Oh well, such is life.


We were personally extremely impressed at the fact that it could stand at such minimal thickness, and earth did extremely well given that the design process ensured that it was mostly compression forces in the structure. The works of the BLOCK Research Group, Anna Herringer, Carl Giskes, Kinya Maruyama, and many others served as valuable precedents for us, and we thank all the great Earth Experts who constantly advised and steered us novices with just about everything. We certainly need to improve our skills at working with earth: the (very) rough edges of the structures are a testament to our novice-level skills at this.

A big thanks to everyone involved for bringing your ideas, expertise, energy, and yourselves to this fantastic workshop. A big thanks to the students and other tutors for giving us the picture that you see above.

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Automating AutoCAD

August 31, 2013, 3:10 pm
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Automating production of 2D drawings from 3D data through Grasshopper. The fabricator required us to produce per-layer drawings for each panel in the structure (6 layers x 12 panels x 3 structures), and annotate the X-Y-Z coordinates of several points on each curve. And we had 3 days to do it. Thus was born this:



Pseudocode:

1. Take base geometry (generated through another process), and panel split lines (drawn manually)
2. Identify the components of geometry by tags and split them
3. Lay them out in 2D space
4. Compute necessary annotations, grid, text, keyplan, coordinate data, etc.
5. Iterating per-panel:
      a) bake all geometry associated with the panel in relevant layers using the ObjectAttributes class
      b) store the Guids of the objects baked in this run
      c) once baking of the objects in the current panel is complete, select them using the Guids stored
      d) call -Export on the Rhino command line through Rhino.RhinoApp.RunScript()
      e) watch as your windows folder populates itself with the drawings :)


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ZHA Serpentine Sackler Opening

September 27, 2013, 7:04 am
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Some photos from the opening of the ZHA Serpentine Sackler Gallery last night. A barrisol shell, super nice columns that double as light wells, well executed curved glass walls, and some very cool hand-dryers in the washrooms. Check it out if you're in London. More details and the official website here.

Kudos to ZHA, Thomas, Jens, Fabian, Torsten, and the rest of the team for pulling it off!










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Fragile Beasts | Sculpting Paper

January 23, 2014, 8:20 am
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A short 3-day workshop at the Łódź University of Technology with a fantastic outcome. Together with 17 students, we managed to do some interesting exercises and build a 1.9m tall beast from half millimetre thick card paper. As evident in the diagrams, the beast was designed and modelled as a cluster of polyhedra, and then a series of scripts were applied to make it curved-foldable. 

Apart from how strong it was structurally (at least to support itself), there were two interesting outcomes of the workshop: In continuing the lineage of curved folding (previously here and here), this prototype proved that curved folded polyhedra can be aggregated to form more complex structures (albeit to a limited extent).

Secondly, it never fails to amaze me how nicely this shape lends itself to fabrication and quick assembly: this piece took about 5 hours of laser cutting time and a further 5 hours to fold, glue and assemble together; and all this by a group of 17 students who had never done any form of curved folding before.

Credits:
Anetta Kepczynska-Walczak | Assistant Professor, Łódź University of Technology, Poland
Sebastian Bialkowski | Doctoral Candidate, Łódź University of Technology, Poland
Suryansh Chandra | Senior Designer, ZHA | Code, London








The Design Intention

The Design Process
The LaserCut Pieces Arrive in the Studio

The Folding Assembly Line

Because Folding is so much Fun :)

Uhu it Up: Gluing the Pieces that form a single Polyhedron 

Parallel Processing: Each Polyhedron could be Assembled with a Small Team of Just 2 or 3

Completed First Polyhedron

Being a Sunday, we Hogged the Entire Corridor of our Floor to Setup our Assembly Line

Joining the first two Polyhedra

Edges Lineup Well

Some Narrow Edges Weren't Conducive to being Folded too Sharply

The Base Coming Together

The Lower Half Forming the Base and the Feet done

The Base and one of the Polyhedrons of the Crown. The Leftovers from the Laser Cutter made into Wall Art on the Left.

A Keystone Piece Locks Everything Together

Alignment Checks

SuperLight: One of the Advantages of Paper

Almost there: The Crown Being put into Place


All done: The Entire Team

Thanks to everyone involved for making this possible and finishing up with such an astonishing outcome in just 3 short days, and to the avid photographers for documenting the entire workshop and taking the pictures you see above. A special thanks to Anetta and Sebastian for all their hard work, time and working relentlessly to make sure everything went smoothly, and all the things we took for granted.

I am curious to see how long this piece stands against the brutality of moisture and curious human beings, which over time will soften and distort the paper eventually buckling and deforming.
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Introducing Elvis

September 7, 2014, 5:32 pm
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Elvis is a 6-axis robotic arm the size of a human arm, built from off the shelf electronics and laser-cut acrylic pieces, and is directly driven from Rhino + Grasshopper. This is the official introduction of Elvis 1.0.



Elvis is open source and shared under a GNU GPL v3.0 licence so you can download everything required to build and use it from its GitHub page. It is very much a work-in-progress, and a lot can be improved. Included in there is a basic template for an end-effector, you can build on top of that to suit whatever it is you want to do with it. You can also modify the basic design of the robot itself to suit your requirement.

Elvis Mission Control in Grasshopper

Why Elvis?


Robotics is an interesting area of design/fabrication research, and recent developments by the likes of ETH Zurich, ICD Stuttgart, Bot & Dolly, TU Delft and numerousothers have created excitement and spurred curiosity around the interesting potential robotics has in design and architecture. But anyone who has ever setup a Kuka/ABB/etc. knows that programming one is no easy task. They're extremely capable, precise and sophisticated in what they can do, but they can take a while to setup making it difficult to test draft ideas and prototype in quick iteration. And that is assuming you are lucky enough to have ready access to a robotic arm -- which most designers don't.

Elvis was conceived to fit this need. It's small, light and portable, and is meant for quick prototyping & iteration -- hence the direct control from within Grasshopper. It is not meant to replace an industrial-grade arm: it is not as precise or as fast, it costs roughly 5% of the cheapest desktop industrial arm available, and it takes a person about 2-3 days to put one together.
 
Elvis's version of "Hello world" 

Technical Details


DOF/Axis: 6
Motors: 8 x Servos, Dynamixel AX-12A
Range: ~525mm for wrist Centre (diagram below explains in detail)
Cost: £480 (UK). Presumably cheaper in the US/Asia. Detailed breakdown here.
IK Solver: Trigonometric
Wrist Type: Spherical



Future Development


Broadly speaking, the precision of the arm needs to be significantly improved. As of now, there is backlash in the system caused by the servos, and there is also flex in the materials used to built the arm itself. Geometric changes can substantially reduce the material flex leading to improved accuracy. Eventually backlash could be reduced through more appropriate hardware.

Elvis uses servos that are capable of reading their positions, so within a tolerance, the arm already "knows" where it is. This could easily be used as a forward kinematic system to digitally read positions in space and generate gcode for larger arms, similar to the system proposed by Andrew Payne, with the added benefit of a 6th axis. A camera/leap/kinect/other sensory mechanism can be used to setup an enhanced feedback system giving it a more precise idea of where it is, where it should be or what it should do next.

There are some very good robot simulation tools available on Grasshopper such as Daniel Piker's Lobster, Robots.IO's Godzilla, etc. Last I checked I was unable to use Lobster as the IK solver for Elvis because of Elvis's asymmetrical axis configuration. I haven't been able to test it with Godzilla as yet, but the intention is to make Elvis easier to use with all these fantastic tools already available.

Acknowledgements


The directors, tutors and students of AAVS Dubai and AAVS Lyon for being wonderful platforms to further the development of Elvis, and the ZHA_code bunch for the insights and stimulating conversations.

The AA Visiting School Dubai showreel about the process of building and using Elvis


Man vs. Robot: Haider and Elvis in an 'axis-fight' at the AA Visiting School Dubai

The Grasshopper control file can compute IK for given toolpaths and directly move Elvis on those paths.

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