Nick Moolenijzer

I started with some inspiration from Parametric House

But unfortunately they didn't have much in the way of instructions or tutorials, so I had to figure things out on my own!

I started out with the base, which I knew would be relatively straight forward. I wanted to make 3 panels that had a certain number of notches that depended on the length of the desired piece and the notch size (i.e., cardboard thickness) The result was this parametric design. Using my specifications of a 15in piece with cardboard thickness of 0.17in, this is the output of the Grasshopper calculation:


After that I got started on the panels that would be put into the notches.

The first thing I tackled was the morphed surface that I would use to trim the plain rectangle panels. I knew this would be the most difficult part, but luckily I found this tutorial on YouTube for how to make such a surface: How to make random wavy surface in Rhino Grasshopper

I followed this tutorial to make the parametric random surface. I started with a plain rectangle that had an arbitrary width and the same length as the panels in step 2 so that they would match up. Then I divided the surface by a parametric value (in this case 5) into a grid of points. Using that list of points and the random number generator, I created some amplitude vectors to move the points in random up and down directions. Then I used the surface from points function to create a new surface using these randomly distributed points! This is what I ended up with:

With the tutorial done, I could get back to business! I created the basic board shape that I would use to intersect with the surface created in step 3. I used the linear array functionality to create copies that matched up with the length of the wavy surface (and consequently, the length of the panels in step 2). Then I extruded the wavy surface and used it to trim the boards and I used the boards to trim the wavy surface, then joined the curves to create outlines. Then I added the 3 notches which would connect to the panels from step 2 and used linear array on those as well, then did the same intersect/join process on them.

Finally, the most difficult part was getting them all back on one plane and distributed evenly. Unfortunately I could not find a way to do this in Grasshopper, but I did realize I could bake them on top of each other and distribute in Rhino, so I did that instead!

Ultimately, my Grasshopper file ended up very complicated, but here's a high level snapshot of what each section contains!

With all of that done, I exported to Illustrator, arranged nicely, and headed to the laser cutter! My laser cutter settings were 50% power and 25% speed, on vector cut.

Finally I assembled!