Summary
It’s that time of year again. Christmas trees have appeared, the weather has changed, holiday decorations are up, and of course, we are all tempted to spend some time playing around with our software creating iconic holiday items. We thought it would be fun to go through one of these explorations for this post.
A few years ago, I worked at an architecture firm. We were supporting a charity at the time, and the task was to design ornaments for auction. I (being a Dynamo user) wanted to make something cool and computational. The result was nice and can be seen below:
Designed in #DynamoBIM and #gh3d. 3D Printed @dpsdesigns with @Ultimaker 2. Created for a charity auction benefitting children. ✊ pic.twitter.com/xWwsNy0Hga
— ʲᵒʰⁿ ᵖⁱᵉʳˢᵒⁿ (@johntpierson) December 2, 2016
Can we make snowflakes in Dynamo?
Yes, you can! And it may be no surprise that one of the people to do it was Jacob Small!
Do you wanna build some digital paper snowflakes?
Or perhaps an infinite number of unique digital paper snowflakes?
Pop into the meet up to wrap up the year of @DynamoBIM community conversations with the @ADSKCommunity, @solamour, @ShaanHurley and I. pic.twitter.com/pgMLDSz5hP— Jacob Small (@JacobWSmall) December 9, 2021
To view the entire process of building out a snowflake graph, check out the community conversation here:
Can we use Generative Design to Build a Snowman?
Yes.
We first need to know what makes a perfect snowman to create “the perfect snowman.”
Luckily someone has made a formula for that!
The formula above translates (roughly) to the following:
“Starting from the bottom, each section should be the previous section’s radius / the Golden Ratio to be ideal. Additionally, the overall height (including the hat) should be the sum of all the section’s diameters.”
Using Generative Design, we can consider all of these criteria while allowing for variance between the designs (based on our opinion).
We can generate everything from the “perfect snowman” to more abstract ideas:
 |
 |
With that in mind, we need to build out our graph.
 |
And here is a video overview of the graph in action:
How to Make a Cool Morphy Thumbnail from Results
For bonus fun, we can export the thumbnails from Generative Design and use a process called Frame Interpolation to make an awesome GIF of the process.
(For an overview of the tool I used, check out this video here, “Frame Interpolation with RunwayML.”)
 |