Grasshopper and Generative Art

If you look closely, this skull is made up of little faces. Some are happy, exposing the reds of their mouths. Others are unhappy, pursing their lips to be mostly yellow circles. What I admire is that each of these faces has individual parameters for their mouth and eyes based on how happy they are. Take a greyscale image and remap value to happiness and you get.. a skull made up of faces.

Parametric controls for each face

These were generated in Grasshopper, a plugin for the CAD and Surface Modeling program Rhinoceros, and that short summary above was the workflow. Since Grasshopper is a visual programming language, like parts of the Unreal Engine, you just plug actors into actors.

This specific project was made by architect  John Locke March 2013, and his blog post was titled “=)”. What I admire is that the faces are very expressive with very little, and what’s there is well-articulated. The eyes and mouth aren’t pinned in place, they shift. It also shows a less serious side of the artist. A lot of his work relates to architecture, and this is a fun side project.