Reskin design Challenge

It’s going to rain this weekend.  Everywhere.  The whole planet.  So cancel your plans now, and do this instead!

Design By Many Challenge: ReSkin

I totally wish I wasn’t involved, because then I could submit something.

“This challenge is to cleverly reskin a decaying urban building on the corner of Broadway and Reade St in New York City. Submissions can range from a focused investigation to an entire reskinning of the building. If the submission is a focused investigation, a wholistic application of the investigation must be represented. Submissions are encouraged, but not required, to incorporate sustainable technologies and strategies into the skin. The skin should be awesome, inventive, and buildable.”

Tool Making: Bezier-ish by points

Revit/Vasari has a couple kinds of splines, regular spline (A) and spline-by-points (B).  You’d think  they were pretty similar, but you’d be wrong.  I’d like to show an alternative to these 2 curve types, (C), a point hosted control polygon based curve.

Regular Spline, sometimes called a b-spline, has a control polygon and a weighted “attraction” to the placement points while Spline-by-points passes precisely through it’s placement points.  Perhaps more important, the Spline-by-points is much easier to associate with other geometry, flexing and stretching with it’s host in a way that is not possible with the regular spline tool, and it is also a 3 dimensional curve that is not restricted to one plane. 

So what can you do if you want the weighted polygon behavior but want to keep the associations between the curve and a host? 

Tool Making: b-spline-ish by points

Download the file from here.