Project online

Yeah, the project is online. Now the hard part of promoting the whole thing. I made this clip to introduce the project. Quality is due to time constraints, if you order at shapeways.com before 4th of december you will recieve your TM (TurrisMotus) before Santa gets to your house!

Grasshopper model for making solids

So the plan was to share TurrisMotus (TM) through Shapemways. And then a solid model is needed instead of the surface model I had so far. So this weekend I worked hard to make it. Here it is:

It grew a little bigger again and some streamlining could be done to decrease build time. But this is for future models where I'd like to have a online application allowing people to build there own TM.

The story continues

Thanks to a good working session with my tutors I finally have a modeling approach that gives me the control I want. Here is a first experiment with it finding out how the shadow might look, made using 'Project' in Grasshopper. (Sun movement is reverse from natural btw.)
In this model I can set radius, height & width of the cell wall and angle of the corners in the bottom row of the structure. It then determines the nr. of cells around and in height on its own to make a fitting roof.

Movement controll

The movement of the cells can be controlled in two ways, the first is to change the angle of the corners. The twist in the cell walls stays constant.

Turris movement by cell twisting

The second way the movement of the cells can be controlled is by changing the twist in the cell walls the angle between the cell walls stays constant.

Intermediate animation result

After some further work and finally making a tower out of the modeled cell this is the result, an impression of the final roof structure. However there is still a fault in the propagation of the cells for they now cross eachother a little bit. You can see this in the corner point where little square overlaps form. However it serves as a good illustration of my goal.

cell modeling done

 After too much time I managed to model the cell using vectors as a base.

The method is both the most perfect and the easiest one I've tried, after realizing how vectors work. Thanks Andrew for now calling me stupid for I must have appeared that way. 

Too bad I spent a week on the others that failed. 

But now I can finally continue in modeling the full TurrisMotus, but first some sleep.

A new movement from TurrisMotus!

Found a new movement when animating in kangaroo, not sure if it's valid though. But it could be a promising way for making a collapsible "roof" structure. Of course this only works with zero thickness lines for now and it was animated only as a spring model without gravity or any other forces. But It's just the beginning. It could also become a mayor product fault, when you open the TurrisMotus and it collapses in onto itself when stretched out too far.

Full cilinder Turris

Finally found a way to build the tower like a cilinder in Grasshopper first and then run it through Kangaroo is order to "relax" the springs to the length I want them to be.
The resulting structure is the one I wanted to build in the first place.

Next step will be making control points to get it moving.

Simulated model

Finally after learning the basics of Kangaroo, thanks for all those instruction video's, I got some working result. It is a spring model of the basic structure and is an approximation to the paper. However it only simulated elastic deformation and since it's not sheet moddeled does not respond to double sided bending. But I'm pleased with this first result so far. check out the video.

Turris motus first modeling attempt

TurrisMotus in paper

The start

Introduction into the project.
Turris Motus, Latin for tower with movement, is a project that started when I was trying to make the corrugated core of a sandwich panel. What I noticed was that it would bend in y-direction when you induced bending in x-direction, something I would later find out is called Poisson's ratio.
A few experiment later I build a tower with some control strings to animate the structure, you can see a video of this here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hzFRypYEpE

Currently I am investigating the properties and laws behind the movement of TurrisMotus in the course Stand-Up Architecture At the faculty of Architecture from the TU Delft.