A.X.I.S.

Computation

Plugin Development

ROLE

Computational Designer

TIMELINE

2 weeks

TEAM

Individual Work

TECH STACK

Rhino, Grasshopper, Python, Eto, After Effects, Premiere Pro

CONTEXT

Seating bowl design is one of the most fundamental aspects of sports architecture. Existing internal tools at Populous for seating bowl design, however, were limited to rectangular fields of play, meaning sports like baseball were excluded from this workflow and designers had to rely on manual design techniques to achieve a high level of resolution.

GOALS

Build a computational seating bowl design grids tool for non-rectangular and irregular fields of play, such as baseball;
Integrate the design grids tool into the company's existing seating bowl tool.

OUTCOMES

Built a computational seating bowl design grids tool for irregularly shaped fields, cutting design times by over 90%;
Incorporated the tool into existing internal tools for section design and 3-D geometry;

ALGORITHM

The tool is built around a segmentation workflow, beginning with the home plate arc and branching out on both sides with an alternating segment and node logic. The following types of parameters were defined:

global, which affected the entire design grid set;

home plate arc, which set baseline parameters for the rest of the grids and defined the starting point;
segment, which controlled the grids along each linear fragment;
node, which controlled the grids in between each linear fragment;
modification, which allowed for post-generation edits at a rigorous and specific level.

Each of these five sections of the design grid structure has associated parameters that control its functionality. The sequence of grid construction is recursive, as follows:

home plate arc

globals

recursion:

left: [segment, node]

right: [segment, node]

modifications

FUNCTIONALITY

3+ hours

10 minutes

10m

Time to create design grids manually

Time to create design grids using A.X.I.S.

The process diagrams above illustrate the recreation of the iconic Fenway Park, a ballpark notorious for its “Green Monster” outfield wall and its irregular seating bowl.

The tool was fully integrated into Populous's existing bowl design tool, with the ability to generate a multi-tier 3-D seating bowl with irregular geometries, convex nodes, and complete control.

POSTSCRIPT

This project was completed in about two weeks, start to finish. After prototyping and then developing the plugin, it was sent to the Digital Team for final integrations and a more comprehensive user interface development. Below is an image of the process (sketches, sketches, sketches!):