Open dluman opened 4 years ago
dluman
commented
4 years ago Working through the various options I have for a book that combines shapes and words, I've cast about for ways that I might leverage a language that is pretty conversant with shapes.
I am thinking about doing this project almost completely in AutoDesk Maya's MEL scripting language with some administrative support from Python.
dluman
commented
4 years ago Would love to work with Maya and MEL/Python -- perhaps that's a future foray. However, for now, I am generating houses, though somewhat unlivable.
I've hijacked shapely (Python) and a couple of other modules not intended for use in this particular way.
dluman
commented
4 years ago And sometimes it even works correctly!
dluman
commented
4 years ago Am letting this run overnight; will put together a post in the morning.
EDIT: 9:30 AM, 12/1 and the thing's still generating.
dluman
commented
4 years ago I present Shelter Should Be the Essential Look of Any Dwelling. While a little late in posting the PDF, I'd like to think that I partially made it this time around as most of the generation was done on the night of 30 November. PDF is linked below, the repository lives here.
As always, a pleasure to engage with everyone's work and I look forward to doing so in the coming months.
Excerpted from the README:
Who knows if it's any good? All I can say for certain is that this iteration is done. When I posted early results to Twitter, one user commented:
I'd live here. I love the idea of never being quite certain there's not somethig happening in an area of the house I can't get to without leaving the possibly illusory safety of the bit I'm already in.
I appreciate how this contrasts/joins with/amplifies the title. I wasn't convinced that anyone would really respond to this somewhat asemic, aleatory operation. The above encouraged me greatly.
This branch of the project ends here. However, I plan to reshape the code developed during the month toward a different set of narrative possibilities. Of course, this means more planning and overall strategy. Much of the code here represents an end-of-the-month dash to get something done (as is usually the case). As such, the PDF is a monster (it's 13,000+ pages), and the architect gets a little lazy with 2 and 3 room houses, but they're all unique.
The PDF: Shelter Should Be the Essential Look of Any Dwelling
FINAL WORD COUNT (purely text): 55,316 COUNTING SHAPES AS "WORDS" IN GRAMMAR: 96,803 (estimated)
Title Derived from a Frank Lloyd Wright (FLW) quote; one of his many dubious, showy, aphorisms.
This project leverages the concept of "Shape Grammar" and the work of Frank Lloyd Wright to attempt a kind of computational architecture and criticism. This centers around FLW's as a kind of shape grammar of "exploded boxes."
"Shape Grammar," a concept surfaced by George Stiny and James Gips in their 1971 work "Shape grammars and the generative specification of painting and sculpture," proposes alternate, geometric grammars for describing building plans. Indebted to Friedrich Froebel's "gifts," an undeniable and admitted influence on FLW's part, this approach to creating a descriptive geometric grammar may have applications in a lexical context (i.e. an approach to generative text) not unlike those of the Markovian or NLP approaches.
Or, to really stir things up as a kindred spirit to @cpressey (#11), I might flip some tables and say that individual shapes are words.
Key question: can "shape grammar" integrate into current or propose new methods for procedural generation.
(Frankly--pun intended--I have no idea if the above is true or means anything. It's November, which means it's time for trying stuff.)
Consulted
This section will be updated regularly.