Parametric Box | AI & Architecture

KIMI K3.1 PRO: FROM SKETCH TO DESIGN OPTIONS According to Moonshot AI, Kimi K3.1 Pro creates and edits geometry from text prompts, sketches and images using scripts for Blender and CAD software. It can be used to explore and compare design options, so you can evaluate ideas in 3D faster before moving into detailed design. Have you tried Kimi yet? Let us know what you think ↓⁠

Announcement and examples

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FEASIBILITY ENGINE: CHANGE THE MASSING, AND THE NUMBERS UPDATE

Move a tower or change the number of floors, and you instantly see the floor areas, apartment count, parking and budget update.

In our Feasibility Engine, geometry is linked to the calculations, so you can compare development scenarios as early as the concept stage. We tailor the tool to the plot, local regulations and construction rates. A demo on a sample plot is available in the browser. Try it ↓

https://parametricbox.com/feasibility-engine

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FREP: GEOMETRY DEFINED BY A FUNCTION BRep describes solids through faces, edges and vertices; faces can be NURBS surfaces.

FRep uses a function to classify points as inside, outside or on the surface without constructing it. Boolean operations and smooth blending combine functions, simplifying complex connections and lattices.

nTop evaluates geometry on demand. Meshing tolerance affects computational cost. More ↓

nTop: Implicit Modeling

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FROM PDF TO 3D MODEL IN 10 MINUTES GPT-6 Astra modeled a house from a 38-page PDF containing drawings and renders. The entire process, including reasoning and generation, took 10 minutes.

Have you tried GPT-6 Astra in your workflow yet?

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WHAT DO YOU NEED TO RUN A GH FILE ON ANOTHER COMPUTER? Before sharing a Grasshopper definition, you can check its dependencies with Pancake.

Addon Manager lists the plugins used and their versions. Portability Report also lists the external files referenced by the definition.

Discussion and sample dependency list ↓

Grasshopper: external dependencies

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COMPLEX FACADES: FROM GRASSHOPPER TO REVIT ADAPTIVE COMPONENTS Grasshopper generates the facade grid and sends its points to Revit through Rhino.Inside.Revit.

Revit places panels from a predefined adaptive family, fitting them to each grid cell.

Grasshopper can also control the panels’ instance parameters. Example and sample files ↓

Adaptive Components with Grasshopper

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WANT TO LEARN HOW TO BUILD TOOLS LIKE THIS WITH AI? If Oasis Canopy made you want to figure out how to build interactive tools like it yourself, here are the contacts of our partner Sergey. He teaches people how to work with computational tools and AI. Write to @rockparametric with the code word OASIS and mention that you came from Parametric Box.

OASIS CANOPY: A COMPUTATIONAL SANDBOX BUILT WITH AI We took one of our real projects, a canopy over a desert oasis, and rebuilt it as an interactive game.

You can move the points, change the shape and height of the roof, the position of the supports, the areas and the river, switch between day and night, and see the result right away.

The finished model exports to OBJ and can be taken further in Rhino or any other 3D software.

We built the tool with AI, without writing any code.

LET’S PLAY ↓

https://parametricbox.com/oasiscanopy

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How to connect Codex to Rhino through MCP without manual setup? We put together a guide based on the problems we ran into ourselves. Attach it to Codex on a Windows machine with Rhino, and it checks the system, installs the components you need, configures MCP and verifies the connection.

We tested it, and the setup ran almost entirely on its own.

Guide in the comments ↓ #PBworkflow #plugin

In Rhino 8, Grasshopper can pass geometry together with its properties. Through Object Attributes you can set an object's layer, name, color, material, linetype and other parameters directly in Grasshopper. When you bake it, the geometry arrives in Rhino with those attributes already assigned. Available in Rhino 8 ↓

https://www.rhino3d.com/en/features/grasshopper/object-attributes

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Content Cache in Grasshopper

is a convenient alternative to the usual Bake when geometry has to be updated regularly.

With standard Bake, every run creates new objects in Rhino, so the old geometry has to be deleted by hand. Content Cache updates the existing objects instead of creating new copies, which is especially handy for large models that keep changing. Available in Rhino 8 ↓

https://www.rhino3d.com/features/grasshopper/content-cache

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We recently added MetaHopper to our workflow for baking. Some nodes in Grasshopper have to be baked by hand, through a right or middle click on each one. MetaHopper lets you bake a whole group of components at once, no matter how many there are or what type they are. On large definitions this saves a noticeable amount of time. MetaHopper ↓

https://www.food4rhino.com/en/app/metahopper

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We ran into an odd quirk in Grasshopper with planarity checks on curves ↓ Different built-in nodes can evaluate the same geometry differently, even though the difference comes down to a few decimal places. That still affects the result:

Boundary Surfaces needs a planar curve and can refuse to build a surface, even when another node reads it as planar.

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HOW THE SHED WORKS: ONE OF THE MOST UNUSUAL MOVABLE BUILDINGS IN NEW YORK

The Shed is a cultural centre in Hudson Yards by Diller Scofidio + Renfro with Rockwell Group.

Its main feature is a huge movable shell. In about five minutes it glides along rails onto the plaza and creates an enclosed hall called The McCourt. The shell frame is steel, clad in lightweight translucent ETFE panels that made the whole structure significantly lighter. #inspiration

A quick note on how sublayers work in the new Rhino nodes ↓

A sublayer cannot simply be passed along with the name of the parent layer.

Model Layer only takes the layer name, while sublayers have to be set separately through the Content / patch node. The screenshot shows this setup:

the layer is created on its own, and the structure information is passed through the content.

A small thing, but without it the layer hierarchy does not behave the way you expect. #PBworkflow

REAL LOVE BY ALEXANDER MILOV

Two monumental steel figures sit side by side, holding hands and looking in the same direction. Inside them, their inner children are finally free. At night the children glow, and the outer cages dissolve into darkness.

The work closes the series that began in 2015, when Milov's sculpture LOVE became one of the most recognised artworks at Burning Man. Our team handled the engineering side of the project. We ran the analysis and structural calculations. #PBcase #pb

CLOSEST GEOMETRY SCRIPT ◽️ We built a script for Grasshopper that automatically finds the points closest to a given geometry and splits them into groups. From there you can apply separate logic to the selected points, for example:

changing elements only in the zone you need, without going through everything by hand.

We'll drop the Closest Geometry Script file in the comments ↓ #PBworkflow #plugin

HEDONIST SCULPTURE, BALI How we built a huge sculpture from a 3D scan made on a regular iPad.

At the core of the project is the face of a real woman, Yulia Malakhova.

It was scanned on an iPad, and from that scan we built a 3D model and refined the form with the artist Alexander Milov.

We split the surface into elements, calculated each one, and checked how light would pass through it.

A team in Indonesia produced and assembled the sculpture from our drawings. Today it stands outside the Hedonist restaurant in Uluwatu, Bali. #PBcase #pb

Here's what our $650,000 project looks like in real life. In the previous post, we showed how 677 individual metal elements were calculated and assembled into one flowing form. This is the final result. The piece was sold for $650,000 and installed as a one-of-a-kind artwork in a historic mansion in central Moscow. You can see it in person at

Prechistenka 8, building 1, Moscow.

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