In my recent pursuit to model every building in the registry of historic buildings, I found that there are two located in my hometown of Germantown Wisconsin. One is surprisingly close to the house that I grew up in, that being the Jacob Schunk farmhouse.
It was built in 1858 for German dairy farmer Jacob and his wife Mary Ann. They lived in the house until their deaths, passing it onto their son and his family. The area around the house is still untouched, though the land nearby has been developed for other residences. It is incredible to me how many times I have driven past the property without even realizing there was a house there, let alone one from 1858. The old trees along the road really camouflage the property. A hidden gem.
In my recent study of Helgaland, I ran into a dilemma. What is the best way to model vertical log walls in Revit?
The first thing I tried was using a bump map texture of vertical lines to approximate the log shadows. This didn’t work nearly well enough and I realized I needed to find a way to actually model the round logs. The shadows are very important for creating realistic renderings of the exterior of the building and a bump map texture just doesn’t do enough.
My next idea was to use vertical wall reveals to create the voids between the logs. See the image below for how this looks in plan view.
Implementing this was more difficult than I hoped. Vertical wall reveals are finickey when it gets near the corners. I solved this by adjusting the walls to be joined by miters. The stacked wall shown below has wall reveals only on the bottom wall type. I think this looks fantastic and achieves exactly what I was going for!
Still there are some issues with this technique. The wall reveals don’t know how to work around window cutouts. They also still have difficulties around some corners. The corner below still has a sharp point, even through I’ve tried the same method as the half wall in the picture above.
So that works well enough for short wall sections with no windows or doors. Unfortunately, many walls have window and doors.
The next thing I tried was to keep a wall for the windows to host to, but add architectural columns on top of them to provide the depth of the logs. The idea is that the columns can be capped in height to stop below the window, and another level can be added above the windows. This technique would be extremely time intensive, and only would really work for existing conditions as moving walls would be a bear.
I’ve seen some forum posts online where people suggest using curtain walls to accomplish this. Usually, people are looking to create horizontal log walls, but in my case I’m creating vertical log walls. The idea is to create a circular mullion profile with the diameter of your logs. Then, set the spacing of the mullions to the same dimension as the diameter (or slightly less to get some overlap). This gives a pretty good log wall effect.
Perhaps the coolest house in La Crosse Wisconsin is, in my opinion, Helgaland. Helgaland was the summer residence of Mr. A Gundersen and his wife, Helga. Dr. Gundersen is known as the founder of Gundersen Health System. The home was designed by Bentley and Merman Architects in the year 1918. It is located smack dab in the middle of the Mississippi river on the north end of Pettibone Island. It is so significantly seperate from the city of La Crosse itself, it must have been considered Dakota Minnesota when it was built. All documentation from the architects say it is located in Minnesota, though it is clearly within La Crosse county borders today.
The site itself is very unique. Pettibone park is seen along the bottom 2/3 of the island. The north 61 acres are the site of Helgaland. The property is still in the Gundersen family to this day. Half of the reason this is the coolest house in La Crosse is simply due to the property itself. It is surrounded by the Mississippi on three sides, with a private forest on the fourth side.
The designs for the home were found in the La Crosse Public Library archives. They are part of the Bentley, Merman, and Skogstad collection. The amount of archived architectural drawings is incredibly cool and I know I will be checking out many more of these when I get the chance.
The level of detail is inspiring. Every little element of the building is hand sketched.
I think it is fascinating how they used all of the limited sheet space. The sheet below has a long elevation on the bottom half, but then on the top half two details are shown oriented to the narrow side of the sheet. Very cool. This is not the only sheet using this technique. Frankly, it makes many of the sheets very difficult to read, but cool nonetheless.
Elevation and Wall SectionWall Section, Interior DetailsInterior Section thru Stairs
Revit Renderings
I modeled the building in Revit as a bit of practice in using the architectural tools. There are so many little details that give this home its character. I have a lot of work to do in creating these details.
View from South East Corner
The view of the front door below shows off some framing details I added. These details are generic models, modeled in place.
View of Front Door
The back door has similar framing details.
View of Back DoorBack of House, Facing North Up Mississippi RiverView from Back of House
The exterior log walls are such an important design feature of this house, I had to figure out a way to model them. Generally, Revit prefers straight and flat walls. I haven’t used the complex wall tools in Revit much, so this project was a great reason to expolore them.
This first technique that I tried was using vertical wall reveals spaced 9″ apart (Because the logs are approx. 9″ in diameter). This only worked well in long stretches of walls, with no windows. It fell apart quickly near the corners as it is disrupted by the joined wall sections. See the image below for the limitations of this technique.
West Side Entrance with Wall RevealsView from West Side of Home
After the vertical wall reveal concept showed many flaws I started brainstorming. The second idea I had was to use architectural columns to hand place each log in the wall. With just columns, the windows and doors would have nothing to host to.
Over the past weekend, I wanted to design a house. I like creating houses that I think I’d realistically enjoy living in. Given the rising cost of construction and property, a smaller house that uses the space efficiently would be ideal. I would also like for the house that I design to be the one that I can live in for the rest of my life. It must be versatile enough to raise a family in, host holidays for adult children, and retire and live in late into life.
The plan was for a 3 bedroom house. I started design with the second and third bedroom. Using en suite bathrooms allows for easy mornings while the kids are school aged. I had the idea of mirrored design in my head, somewhat like the jack and jill layout, just with en suite bathrooms instead. The mirrored rooms with doors on either side of the building allow for significant privacy.
Each room has a closet, room for a large bed, and space for a desk/workspace. I wanted to be sure that up to a queen size bed would fit comfortably in the room. Looking to the future, the price of housing is only going up, so keeping a viable space for adult children to stay at home, maybe even with their own family is important to me. They also have nice large symmetrical windows.
Using the west wing as the master suite made sense. The master requires a walk-in closet, room for a king or California king bed, and a large bathroom with a separate toilet room. I also thing keeping the laundry near the bedrooms just makes logical sense. There are some houses that I’ve seen where the laundry is all the way down next to the garage; a story away from the bedrooms.
After getting an idea of how the bedrooms would be laid out I needed to figure out the rest of the rooms. In order to make this house fit to retire in, it would be best to have the master bedroom on the first level. With all bedrooms on the first level, it doesn’t seem practical for me to include a second floor.
The kitchen is simple but has everything needed. I made sure to maintain the fridge, sink, oven/stove triangle. The width of the kitchen allows for a nice long island with adequate seating. A formal dining area doesn’t really exist with the current layout, so the island serves as the daily eating area.
With some improved design, the family room could be shifted over to allow for a formal dining area. Like the kitchen, this wasn’t the primary concern with this home, so it could use some refining. The far right side of the room shows built in shelving for storage.
Finally, the entry of the home is simple, yet effective. I’ve always liked the idea of having an entry that is one step down from the rest of the home. This gives a clear seperation of where outdoor stuff like shoes and jackets should be kept, thus keeping the rest of the house cleaner. In Japan, this type of entryway is called a Genkan.
I started by cleaning up some previous code. I realize now how important keeping a consistent data structure can be. I want to organize my groups using some sort of color code. Yellow for user input, Green for user output, red for calculations or something like that. I’ve seen something like that online before but I can’t recall where.
There is a very powerful tool for Grasshopper within Rhino 3D. The Ladybug Tools collection includes many add-ons that allow for energy calculations, lighting calculations, air flow calculations, and much more. Building detailed models for energy and light simulations has never been simpler using Rhino’s speedy modeling tools.
I find the visual programming workflow that Grasshopper provides to be very intuitive in developing a model. Having the ability to simply export the model to .gbxml, we can verify our results in other HVAC load calculators.
For this study I am using the model of a gym in Davenport Iowa.
Preliminary Rendering
The building was built as a warehouse, with wood framed construction, and a mix of conditioned and unconditioned zones. The study is to determine whether the existing HVAC equipment is adequate for the existing space, and what might need to be done to improve comfortability.
Honeybee Model showing Roof, Exterior Walls, Windows, Doors
In terms of models, this one is pretty interesting. The mix of conditioned and unconditioned spaces as well as the mix of single story (full height) and two story (half height) rooms makes the construction unique.
Roof and Ceilings Removed showing Interior Walls, Floors
I also think there are some quite simple things to fix that would make the space more efficient. For one, the only windows in either warehouse space are facing north. The sun never gets a good angle on them, as shown in my preliminary light simulations.
Annual Light Study
Because of this the garage doors tend to be open, for light and airflow. This solution is usually adequate. If the space were ever to be conditioned, it may be ideal to replace one or more of the garage doors with clear garage doors. This also could cut down on the intense glare late in the day on the east wall of the building. I intend to adjust the materials of the doors in my Honeybee model to test the effect of clear doors.
Better Model with Internal Walls
The northern windows are up high. Changing one window to a louver for ventilation may help keep hot air out in the heat of summer. With glass garage doors, they can be kept shut, or only up a foot or two to allow cool air in from below.
These simulations were generated through my Grasshopper definition. It can be seen in full below:
Continue reading to read my explanation of how it works. I often refered to the Philipp Galvan Design YouTube channel for guidance in making these simulations.
I start by creating a Honeybee Model. First we define our rooms. Each room is created using closed polysurfaces(Solids).
This is the icon for a brep. We use icons like this one to bring geometry from Rhino into our Grasshopper definition.
The building type can be set next. There is some easy to use dropdown menus for simple things. HB Climate Zones are the ASHRAE climate zones. I may have to move the “HB Building Programs” selector to each individual room block, to allow different room use cases. I selected Warehouse for now to approximate a general commercial use for the building. As I look at this block, I should move the construction set by climate component back, and the Building Programs up to each room block. Also add relays.
This first unique component is called “HB Intersect Solids”. Because we are doing a more complicated model with every room modeled there are some locations where the
This idea of requiring a boolean toggle is common through this code. Many of the Honeybee components take significant time when they run. Having a quick way to turn them off allows you to edit specific parts of the code at once.
Adjust camera position with the right mouse button.
Double-click to enter the fullscreen mode.
On mobile devices swipe to rotate.
On mobile devices pinch two fingers together or apart to adjust zoom.
On mobile devices 3 finger horizontal swipe performs panning.
On mobile devices 3 finger horizontal swipe performs panning.
The general dimensions for the model of this bridge were found in an issue of Civil Engineering by ASCE. Page 41 in the November 2022 magazine show these images depicting a general scale of the bridge.
An interesting application for 3D printing is in the presentation of architectural models, either to show multiple proposed options, or as an intuitive way to present a design so the viewer can get a sense of scale and overall feel of the building. To show this I modeled the floors of a residental suburban house in seperate pieces. The roof can be removed to reveal floor two. Floor two can be removed to reveal floor one, and so on.
I would like to get more furnishings modeled into it, but for a first go, I’m happy with it. Things like kitchen cabinetry and garage items will help the model feel to scale more. The window and door details are minor, but help get a sense of scale.
Providing a way to align the levels would also be essential in a final scale model. Perhaps magnets would work, but physical pins might be simpler. In this location I have a section of wall that does not line up from first to second floor. It was an issue in the modeling, fixed in software.
The structure is also missing the stairs, the front porch, the basement, and the back deck. All of which could be added to improve the sense of scale.
The idea to design a print in place hinge is one I had in college. I wanted to create a protective case for an external hard drive that also has the mounting holes for my Raspberry Pi 3+. Figuring out the mounting holes for the PI was simple. The dimensions are clearly posted online so I first made a simple support piece with holes and space for zip-ties to hold the PI in place.
The intention was to use the PI and drive combo as a portable media center where a library of tv shows and movies can be easily hooked up with simply a power outlet and an HDMI cord. Since the initial idea was had, I have built and maintained a 12TB NAS storage server which hosts a Plex server with so much more media than I ever could have fit onto a single drive. With just an internet connection, any smart device can access the full library; clearly a better solution.
My first attempt at a P-I-P hinge was at the same time as an interest in printing basic geometric shapes. It was a simple container made of two halves of an isosohedron with a single hinge segment connecting the two. Interestingly, the filament ran out half way through the print so it happens to be two toned.
Shockingly, my first attempt at a P-I-P hinge was successful! I forget the specific tolerances of the hinge mechanism, but I do know it ended up pretty loose. I think I used around 1/16″ of tolerances all around (see below for more information on tolerances). It also doesn’t help at all that there was only one hinge section. With future designs I made sure to use multiple hinge segments.
I wanted the part to be special in that it could only be created using 3D printing. The pin of the hinge has a curve in profile view, making the pin narrower at the middle and wider near the ends. The outer part of the hinge used the matching curve, with some tolerance.
image of profile view wireframe of hinge
I figured that the pin of the hinge doesn’t technically need to be a cylinder, and that perhaps having the pin wider at the base and narrower down the middle would be better for supporting the thin plastic. Traditional manufacturing methods would not permit an axle being built like this as it would be practically impossible to assemble.
Future designs of P-I-P hinges don’t include this kind of complexity, though I did produce a working prototype of an external hard drive case that does. It uses four hinge units along the long side of the case. The bottom section only holds the drive with a hole for a USB connection. The top is trickier, with some raised sections designed to hold the PI support piece (seen above) and more space designed to hold SD cards or other devices.
image of ehd case
As mentioned, the hinge geometry is like the isosohedron design I used. The pins narrow near the middle. With four hinge sections, the action of the hinge actually is quite satisfying.
image of open hinge, hinge details
This was the longest print I had done to date. I had to leave it overnight at school, but I’m not sure the actual print time on it. When I noticed the layer shift in the print the next morning I was worried it would affect the hinge. To my surprise the hinge still worked. Unfortunately, the box no longer closed properly. The layer shift effect was doubled thanks to the design.
image of layer shift profile
A few years have passed since that point. I have left the convienence of college 3D printers and now am constantly looking for projects to do on my AnkerMake M5 printer. With that I needed software other than the free college accounts I had been using at that point. Near the end of 2022 I purchased a persistant liscence to Rhino 3D. Rhino includes many helpful features, one of which is the visual programming language known as Grasshopper 3D.
Image showing Rhino and Grasshopper
Below is my program to produce custom sized P-I-P hinges. There are special settings to specify the overall tolerance amount, number of hinge segments, and more.
I find that 0.4mm of tolerance between all surfaces is plenty good enough for standard applications. I initially tried this as it is the nozzle diameter of the printer I use, as well as most of the printers I used at school. 0.4mm seems to me to be the standard residental printer resolution. With a more precise printer, and maybe some layer settings, slicing tolerance for example, the tolerance might be able to be brought down. Naturally, lower tolerances should create tighter fitting hinges.
I’ve always been interested in a very specific chess set. It is the set shown in the intro video to the game Age of Empires 2: Age of Kings.
The set, known as Lewis chessmen, is a unique set of pieces. The main pieces (all but the pawns) are especially humanoid.
image of Lewis chessmen
I intend print out a set of pieces in the Lewis chessman model.
Note that the Knight is not finshed yet. This has yet to be printed.
Pawn
Rook
Knight
Bishop
Queen
King
Something that I would like to integrate into the design is some sort of chamber inside the base of the pieces that can be filled to provide weight.
If I can make easily printed threads, I can create a plug to hold heavy fill material to get these to a better weight, with the weight located in the base. It would be nice to write a Grasshopper definition to do just that.
For fill material I’m thinking sand, small ball bearings, or some combination of both. Ball bearings might be easy to feel, when they roll around inside, but if they can fill the volume of the space they would be pretty stable. Sand might also feel strange, and sound like a maraca if there is space. In either case, limiting empty space is the key.
Professional chess sets have specific weights and tolerances for each piece. I think. After looking into FIDE handbook, there is no note of the weight of pieces. The height is defined, but not the weight.
After plugging the space, we must secure the bottom of the piece. The simplest thing to do is to add a circle of felt.
