Blog

I was part of the teaching team at MIT Design-Build Workshop 2019 in Shanghai for a month, a joint workshop from MIT Architecture, ETH Zurich Block Research Group, and Tongji University. The workshop explores robotic additive manufacture and assembly of novel shell structures. More information can be found here on the BRG website. Teaching materials can also be found on our GitHub repo. With students from both Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Tongji University, we built two projects. ...

About PhysX.GH is a rigid body simulation tool for Grasshopper. It uses open source real-time physics engine NVIDIA PhysX and a C# wrapper from stilldesign/PhysX.Net. It runs with GPU and provides users with fast simulation results. Download: https://www.food4rhino.com/app/physxgh Forum: https://www.grasshopper3d.com/group/physx-gh License PhysX.GH © 2016-2020 Gene Ting-Chun Kao, Long Nguyen and The Asian Coders.

Abstract This paper proposes a workflow for Assembly-Aware Design (AAD) of masonry shell structures and introduces an interactive tool in a CAD environment to assist the design process while simulating the step-by-step assembly of masonry blocks. Thus designers can explore the design space of masonry shell structures and be aware of structural performance before the assembly phase, at the early design stage. Masonry shell structures are an old construction technique, which has recently received a lot of attention due to new computational methods. Even though the form of such a structure is optimised for structural performance, its incomplete form during construction often requires the support of falseworks, which can be extensive, costly and time-consuming. To tackle this unsolved problem, we developed an assembly strategy that significantly reduces the falsework usage while still maintaining the equilibrium of the incomplete shell at each assembly step. The key idea is to compute a disassembly strategy inspired by the Jenga game and then reverse it to obtain the actual assembly sequence of the masonry blocks. Rather than using discrete element methods to predict the structural behaviour of the masonry blocks, we employed the GPU-based rigid-body dynamic solver from the engine NVIDIA PhysX, this allows very fast computation speeds while still offering sufficient accuracy for our purposes. Finally, we verified our method using small-scale 3D printed models. ...

Leopard - A new way to process mesh in Grasshopper, a cool GH plugin. We are pleased to announce our new plugin for Grasshopper: “Leopard” http://www.grasshopper3d.com/group/leopard Leopard is an open source mesh processing solution for grasshopper that allows users to interact with rhino geometry and create customised mesh shapes. By selecting Mesh vertices, edges and faces, users have more freedom to edit meshes intuitively and use different subdivision schemes to selectively choose multiple areas to fix. ...

I was in the computational design team while designing the ICD/ITKE Research Pavilion 2015-16 and was mainly in charge of developing computational tools. Here is the demonstration video to show the geometrical implementation. One of the input parameters from the plugin is a mesh surface, and the output parameters are all tree data structure thus some double-layer light weight structure as well as some planar plates can be generated (Planar plate wasn’t realized due to the decision making and scheduling during the development). All the geometries are labeled in the right sequence so they can be fabricated directly: ...

There are some modes I used to turn my emacs into a powerful IDE environment for c++, python and latex editing. So I post it here to share with anyone who might have interest in using emacs as main editor. In my OS X, I have installed those packages and Lisp scripts including, MELPA package manager, AUCTeX, irony-mode, company-mode, highlight-symbol, flycheck, company-irony-c-header, auto-complete, ac-math, Yasnippet, Neo Tree, company-auctex, ggtags, cpputils-camke, pyenv-mode, anaconda-mode, languagetool For more information about c++ IDE environment settings please see this amazing introduction. Here is my emacs/aquamacs setting file: ...

I wrote this short swarm script with GUI interface in Processing about 4 years ago (When I began to code)… Now I figure out lots of code from this script should be improved! For instance, we can implement KDTree later… Hope this code from the previous version will help people who needs or interested in it. Processing Source Code: drawLineFish3DUI.pde //============================================================================ // Name : drawLineFish3DUI.pde // Author : Gene Ting-Chun Kao // Version : 2012-7-19 // Copyright : GNU General Public License // Description : Swarm 3D with Tail GUI //============================================================================ import toxi.geom.*; import processing.opengl.*; import peasy.*; import controlP5.*; import java.util.Calendar; Manage man; PeasyCam jCam; ControlP5 jControl; ArrayList fishes; PMatrix3D currCameraMatrix; PGraphics3D g3; int c1 = 0; int c2 = 0; int c3 = 0; boolean attractor = false; boolean stop = false; void setup() { size(1200, 800, OPENGL); smooth(); g3 = (PGraphics3D)g; jCam = new PeasyCam(this, 100); Slider(); man = new Manage(400, 50); man.createFish(); } void draw() { if (jControl.window(this).isMouseOver()) { jCam.setActive(false); } else { jCam.setActive(true); } background(0); man.display(); gui(); } void keyReleased() { if (key == 's' || key == 'S') saveFrame(timestamp()+"_##.png"); } String timestamp() { Calendar now = Calendar.getInstance(); return String.format("%1$ty%1$tm%1$td_%1$tH%1$tM%1$tS", now); } void Slider() { jControl = new ControlP5(this); //mousePosistion jControl.addSlider("c1",-200,200,10,610,100,10); jControl.addSlider("c2",-200,200,10,630,100,10); jControl.addSlider("c3",-200,200,10,650,100,10); jControl.addToggle("attractor", false, 10, 680, 100, 10).setMode(ControlP5.SWITCH); jControl.addToggle("stop", false, 10, 715, 45, 10); jControl.setAutoDraw(false); } void gui() { currCameraMatrix = new PMatrix3D(g3.camera); camera(); jControl.draw(); g3.camera = currCameraMatrix; } Fish.pde ...

My reading list when writing master thesis at Stuttgart University. Master Thesis Reading – Steering Behavior For Autonomous Characters Master Thesis Reading – The Construction of Gothic Cathedrals

After two years….. finally have time to upload my undergraduate architectural thesis design Processing + Java code to github.com as open source. Take a look if anyone is interesting, and welcome to download it. Java environment is Java SE 6. Go to Github Link DigitalLampThesisGUI_v0a01 The Digital Lamp of Architecture – A New Church Prototype Thesis Video 3D Printed Model(Also generated by this java code) * This is GUI software of Project of “The Digital Lamp of Architecture” * Written by Gene Ting-Chun Kao +GENEATCG http://www.geneatcg.com all right * reserve. * Code written in 2013/05 * * Code credit to Jared Counts Curtain Coding Structure in * BlueThen.com The Digital Lamp of Architecture referred to John Ruskin’s book “The Seven Lamps of Architecture, " and make a comparison between its age and our digital age. Through traveling, description in theory can be highly discovered within backpacker’s own eye. Finally, digital technology was implanted into church architecture as an example to reflect on Ruskin’s theory. One of the most important element is “Sublime.” Besides, scale, structure and ornamentation was used to interpret and practice in Digital Architecture. The Digital Lamp of Architecture 由《建築七燈》出發來討論其在數位時代的意義，並且在製作期間透過親身經驗映證書中的討論，最後再以教堂為例，探索如何應用新的數位工具回應書中的觀點，特別是Sublime, 並討論尺度、結構、裝飾與其代表的精神向度在數位建築的詮釋與實踐。

Currently I am starting my master thesis, and a tool that I am trying is called Latex. After googling for a while, tonnes of tools and tutorials came up. In my opinion, Latex is super easy and convenient. I especially like its philosophy “Concentrate on Content not on Layout.” It is so convincing that when we are doing our research or write our document we should concentrate on its content instead of its layout. Architect normally spend too much time of making things pretty instead of making them useful(or making them work). At the end, I decided to choose my favourite editing tool Aquamacs, the Emacs for the mac, to write it, because it is already integrated with LaTex and its extensions AUCTeX, preview-latex and flyspell. I also recommend everyone who interested in these tools to try this thesis template as well. Masters/Doctoral Thesis which is super elegant and convenient. Here is my screenshot of using LaTex in Aquamacs: ...