Digital Reincarnation of Non-Standard Material

This project aims to develop a comprehensive workflow for effectively using non-standard materials, with a particular focus on bamboo as a sustainable alternative to traditional building materials. The project will explore various aspects of fabrication and material joints to develop a workflow that is both efficient and effective.

Bamboo

Bamboo's rapid growth and strength make it an eco-friendly construction material, yet it's rarely used in its natural state for permanent structures. Typically transformed into laminated elements, bamboo's unique attributes, such as its varying thickness and off-centered nodes, are often overlooked. The potential for bamboo to create resource-efficient, form-active structures remains untapped.

Workflow

This project suggests a method for converting non-standard materials into digital formats, enabling a comprehensive assessment to identify their application across diverse architectural elements.

Digitalization

Both machine vision and 3D scanning technologies are integrated into the digitization process.

The computer vision using the OpenCV library, the edge detection algorithm. The script filters the background and gets a high contrast of objects aside from the Background to have the outlines. 

Artec Spider 3D scanner for initial scanning. Scanner achieves high accuracy, capturing up to 1M points/sec. Software features include 3D editing and merging for alignment.

Each bamboo stick harbors node details such as distance, radius, and coordinates. This information is encoded into a QR code for further use in procedures. Following procedures for each bamboo stick also incorporate additional details into this QR code, establishing it as identity information for manufacturing.

Assessment

Each bamboo is evaluated across four aspects, to guide the allocation of individual bamboo characteristics to various architectural elements

Architectural Application

After digitization and assessment, each bamboo's data is stored in a library. Each architectural design element can then leverage the most compatible bamboo from the database.