Create Your Own Adaptive Part: Chair Example

In this article we will build together your first adaptive part, the goal is to design a Chair and parametrically manipulate it with Adaptive Parts Environment (APE) UI in Rhino3D.

Build The Basic Shape 

In order to create your adaptive part, you need to model your geometry on Grasshopper and take into consideration your parameters which will manipulate the adaptive part later. In this example, we will model our chair as a Cylinder and focus on Height and Radius as our main parameters.

Define Inputs 

After building your definition, we need to define your pre-selected parameters as inputs to manipulate the adaptive part. Ape Input component is responsible for that, in this example we defined the chair Radius, Height, Base Radius, and Base Height as inputs and added names to each parameter, you can define the names in each slider or use the Name section and set a name list, then you can categorize some parameters together.

Define Objects and Attributes 

Now we need to define our Adaptive part as an object and set some attributes to it, for this we need to use Ape Object component and Ape Attributes. In this example, we will define Layer Name,  Object Color and Color Source as attributes to our objects as a list, then add the geometries to Ape Object component.

Define Metadata and Bake Object 

Last but not least, you have the option to define Metadata to be recalculated and shown every time you manipulate your Adaptive Part. In our example we will define the Chair Height and Base Height as metadata, then bake our Adaptive Part to manipulate through the UI in Rhino3D.