Designing space ships with Grasshopper
I wanted to challenge myself and design the AI space ships that will end humanity. Since it was going to be designed by AI, I figured I will force myself to only use math and programming to model and design my ships. All the ships you see here were modeled completely inside of Grasshopper with Rhino. In fact, they are the same algorithm. The only difference between them is about 6 numbers.
These are just fun form studies I did in a lazy Sunday afternoon. Nothing too serious.
The Combat Fighter
This is the little guy that can fly into earth atmosphere and destroy any threat before it gets close to the mother ship.
The Mother Ship
This is the massive station where the Artificial Intelligence is running. Their is a weak spot but we wont ever see it because to get to her, we need to get past him.
The Final Boss
Theirs no real story line here. You see him, you die. That's about it. AI can beat us in everything, war is no different.
Break down of the process
Building the "Frame" of the spaceship using the math functions Sine and Cosine. I call it a "frame" because this curve controls the look of the ship.
I connect straight lines to different points in the curve and divide the curves into equal segments. This gives me more points to make the design more dynamic.
I add a Voronoi cell function to those points and scale each cell down.
I use a distance threshold to eliminate the outer cells. Exposing this very dynamic inner structure.
Here I just separate the cells into an inner and outer structure. Than I get the inner structures, get their edges, and add a blue cylinder to them.
Grasshopper is Awesome
It's pretty crazy to think that these are all the same algorithm. The difference between them is about 6 numbers. This is another example on how incorporating algorithms can help us design and model things we would have never been able to. This algorithm took me an afternoon to write. Once it was written, all I have to do is move numbers around and the algorithm does all the heavy lifting. Once I change the parameters I want, it takes my computer about 30 seconds to finish the model. After that I export them into Modo and render them with Octane.