4 Curves, Infinite Glassware

Alas, as I assumed would happen last week a little practice and some guidance and I am warming up to using Grasshopper. In fact, all of the above vessels were made with Grasshopper and Rhino. 4 simple curves, at various heights relative to one another, and with varying radii, and one can create all of the above vessels and more. Here’s how I did it:

1. Begin with the bottom curve, which in my case was a circle. I chose the circle command in grasshopper and it gave me a plane and a radius option. I hooked up a number slider (ranging between 1–10 with only integers) to the radius and voila, a circle was made.
2. Once the bottom was made, then I made the first mid curve. I began as I did with the bottom curve by making a circle, hooking up a number slide to the radius and leaving the plane as is. Then I used the circle output and added the move command to it. I wanted to be able to change the height of my first mid curve so I input the Unit Z Vector command and hooked up another (you guessed it!) number slider. A little copy and paste action duplicated my first mid curve to make the second mid curve and also the top mid curve.
3. Once all of the curves were set, the lofting began. I put in the loft command and added the curve outputs to the loft input starting from the bottom and moving up from there. Once the curves are lofted, right click on the loft control and click ‘bake.’ This will loft the curves in Rhino.

Step One

Step Two

Step Three

From there, by simply changing the radii of the curves and the height difference between them I could create all kinds of vessel shapes. I began with vases, but those felt flat to me (my first round of doing this project I used polygons instead of circles but didn’t feel like I had as much intuition for how to make interesting shapes that I actually liked). And then I realized I could make more than vases, I could make all kinds of glasses and barware. I made a beer glass and wine decanter as a result.

Next steps are figuring out how to create the offsets of the lofted curves in order to give them real form (lofting makings the shapes infinitesimally thin and paper-like) so that they would be ready for 3D printing or some other kind of fabrication. Thanks for following along!