Squiggle Vision Sketches

Recently I upgraded my modeling software to Rhino 6. In addition to staying up to date with the latest software and making sure my modelling and drafting skills are up to snuff, I was most excited about the expanded capabilities for rendering and visualization. There is a special place in my heart for quickly generated graphics and drawings. As a student I often finished my presentation boards in the wee hours of the morning and being able to shoot out additional graphics always felt like I was running a successful con on the professors who were forcing me to stay up for days at a time. Rhino has some plugins available for download that mimic hand drawing however I wanted to try and see if I could create my own rendering style without purchasing additional software.

Unlike my other test drawings, which use custom display modes, this rendering trick uses a very simple grasshopper script to mimic Squigglevision images. This animation style was popularized by one of my favorite cartoons, Dr. Katz, and mimics the effect of a hand drawing. It also mimics the booze addled napkin sketches produced during many late nights in studio.

Functionally, the script operates by referencing lines created with the make2d command and interpolating a new line that deviates slightly from the original using control points to warp it . The line is referenced, subdivided into control points, and the control points are moved perpendicularly by a range of values between -1 and 1. There are some additional controls in place to mitigate for randomness factors and lines that are very short but that is pretty much it.

Included below is the script with instructions to explain how it operates.

• Choose your view and and use make2D command.
• Takes the curves you just created and use explode to get each line ready to be referenced individually. The script will generally work with closed lines however it works better if each line is understood as a separate curve.
• From here you can import the curves into grasshopper and follow the instructions on the canvas.
• After you use the sliders and get an image that looks good, bake the modified geometry back into Rhino and it is ready to be exported or rendered with viewcapturetofile.

SQUIGGLE HAND SKETCH