Inspired by one of David Fano’s recent blog posts, I decided to give Rhino’s Grasshopper plugin (formerly called Explicit History) a try. It is pretty amazing what can be done with it and how easy it is to use. I haven’t venture too far at this point – there’ll be more to come when I get the hang of all the functions.
In this little exercise I modeled a grid of randomly extruded squares that would then be cut out of a panel. The panel is shown at the bottom of this post as a rendering, which was produced in Kerkythea.
![Grasshopper plugin dialog](https://i0.wp.com/alexschreyer.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/grasshopper_screen-1-531x480.jpg?resize=531%2C480)
The image above shows the net that created the random extrusions. The RecGrid component produces the grid and outputs 100 square polylines. The extrusion height is controlled through a vector component, which is fed by a random number generator.
On the left of the above image is the “baked” result of this operation and on the right is a cut out panel.
Finally, this is a rendering of the panels on a wall. I used the MLT (BiPT) setting in Kerkythea and 9 passes were enough for this image size.