My Attempt to Build a Generator
I spent quite a bit of time figuring out what kind of generator I wanted to create for this parametric design exercise. As I was scrolling down my social media feeds I noticed a DIY video showing how to turn boring candles into something super trendy and modern just by heating up paraffin wax candles and bending them a certain shape. After watching the video I thought that changing the parameters on these candles would be cool because it would allow you to produce variations by changing the inputs. So I went ahead and did lots of research to understand generators.
The process
I started by watching a lot of tutorials on how to create shapes in Rhino and how to work in Grasshopper as well. I opened up Rhino and started making my candles in different forms. This process took me a while because it had been a couple months since I had worked in Rhino. I started out by making a straight and simple candle and tried to use the cylinder tool to create the shape, and since it did not turn out like I had imagined, I used the curve tool to create lines and proceeded to use the revolve tool to complete the shape. I also could not figure out how to set paraffin wax as the candle material, so I had to choose plastic instead. When I was trying to make the candles more curved, I struggled trying to figure out how to use the curve and revolve tools. I tried to use this for the more complex candle shapes but struggled a lot, I found that using the curve tool first and then the pipe tool was more effective. Going through this process of just making the different candles in Rhino made me feel much more comfortable with the software. However, as I started working in Grasshopper I quickly noticed that I was lacking the skills to create a generator for my candles. I searched around on the internet for several hours looking for tutorials that would help me with this project. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything that was helpful to create my generator.
I managed to figure out how to change the thickness of my candle, but my desire was to be able to change the shape, which I could not figure out how to do. I could not find any tutorials on what I was looking for, which made it really difficult to achieve my desired end result. If anyone out there knows how to solve this problem, I would love to go back to this project and finish it.
