Rhino

We invite you to join us for the next special training session at our European office in Barcelona. Aaron Porterfield, industrial designer and founder of F=F, will lead a three-day Crystallon Workshop.
This intensive 3 day course will focus on understanding and generating functional lattice structures using Rhino, Grasshopper and the Crystallon plug-in. The course will cover the fundamental understanding of lattice structures and their real-world applications, generating the necessary geometry using Crystallon, simulation and optimization using FEA and evolutionary tools, and meshing/optimization for 3d printing and production. The outcome of the class will be not only the understanding of the tools, but how to incorporate them into your workflow and create functional models that are ready for production.

Day 1 : Fundamentals

• What is a lattice structure? A brief history of crystallography and inspiration from nature.
• Why use a lattice structure? Applications and industry case studies.
• Understanding the different types of lattice structures and their applications.
• Anatomy of a lattice structure and introduction to the Crystallon tools.

Day 2: The Crystallon tool set

• Voxelization – Generating uniform and conformal cells using BREPs, meshes, surfaces or curves
• Populate – Populating cells with a lattice and using data to morph between structures
• Clean up – Trimming a lattice and removing unnecessary beams
• Modify – Creating a skin and connecting the lattice to the skin
• Thicken – Use FEA/Optimization data to assign thickness to beams and shells
• Meshing – Various tools for preparing an STL file ready for 3D printing

Day 3: Application Demos

• Uniform beam lattice demo (Structural light-weighting – for mechanical parts)
• Conformal beam lattice demo (Energy absorption – 3D printed footwear)
• Conformal shell demo – (Structural FDM – 3D printed chair)
• Conformal shell demo – (Heat transfer – Conformal cooling channels for injection molding)

Building on the introductory course, the 3-day advanced course will focus on advanced aspects of C# scripting and plugin programming for Grasshopper. In addition to going in-depth with Rhino geometries, custom graphics display and Rhino-Grasshopper interaction, we will learn different techniques to vastly improve code performance and significantly speed up execution time (including using multithread parallel computing). The participants will also have the opportunity to kick start the development of their own personal projects under the instructor’s guidance.

Day 1:
• ScriptSync: Using Visual Studio as a replacement C# Code Editor in Grasshopper.
• Custom graphics display (custom colors, materials, styles, etc…)
• Rhino geometries (Curves, Surfaces, Meshes).
• String editing: useful for generating robot/machine control codes.

Day 2:
• Programmatically interacting with Rhino modelling environment from Grasshopper (including geometry baking)
• C# Delegates
• Computational complexity: understanding code performance and scalability
• Spatial Data Structure: using RhinoCommon R-Trees to accelerate 3D searches, proximity checking, collision detection…
• Parallel computation with the .NET Task Parallel Library

Day 3:
• Personal project development
• (Optionally discuss topics requested by the participants)

Course Fee: EUR 795 (+VAT); full time students and university teachers will get a 50% discount (proof of status required).  Bookings will be formalised once payment is cleared.