That time I tried to build a generator…
Who doesn’t love pasta? (okay, maybe if you’re gluten free then I get it), but pasta is a something most people can behind. Maybe I was hungry, maybe it was just about dinner time, because when we were assigned to create a generator with Rhino and Grasshopper, the first idea that popped into my head was pasta.
The more I thought about pasta and looked into the many shapes of pasta, I knew this could be a good parametric design exercise. So I opened up Rhino and began to create my pasta generator (too bad it’s only a digital generator and not an actual generator).
I sought out inspiration and found that the basic shape of most pastas are a kind of cylindrical shape, two circles on each end. Having just refreshed my knowledge of Rhino, this seemed like an easy enough feat to create parametrically. I drew some circles, lofted those circles into cylinders, changed the parameters of the circles and created all kinds of shapes and sizes.
By adjusting the sizes of the two circle I was lofting, I could create cannelloni, spaghetti, and rigatoni shapes. Angling the circles 45 degrees and then lofting made penne, adding a third circle and alter the directions of the outer circles made macaroni, and intersecting two circles and running the sweep 1 rail command made anellini. The pasta shape I was most proud of that I made was cavatappi by creating a helix and repeating the sweep 1 rail command with varied radii for the cross section. Overall, by changing the inputs of circle radii, their direction and position relative to each other, I was able to create various forms of pasta shapes all from circles. This workflow worked for me and I began to get the hang of it quickly. I think an introductory tutorial of pasta making in Rhino would be very helpful for the novice. My confidence with Rhino began to grow.
But then, throw in Grasshopper, and my technical skills began to fall short and there seemed to not be any tutorial out there that could explain how to do what I was seeking after. I wanted to see if there was a more automatic way to alter the radii of the circles and the distance between them in order to make the basic cylindrical shapes of pastas, and after many trials and errors I could not sort out how to do it on my own. If any of you figure out, I’d love to see how it’s done. Let’s hope that some continued time and practice with learning Grasshopper will enable me to revisit this pasta project and make it even more parametric and automatic than before.
