The Area.

The Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia is involved in a research project to transform the city of Barcelona in a Zero Emission city.

For that, an interactive model has to be fabricated, so design decisions can be made. In this tutorial, we will describe the step by step of how to send the 3D model of the barrios of Camp del’Arpa, La Sagrera, Congrés and Navas, to the milling machine so it could be milled.

After the model was printed in a high density foam, it was inserted in the model of the entire city of Barcelona. The scale of this model is 1/2000, and it will be used as a study model. A final interactive model will be built, and this will help in the design decision.

To view the step-by-step RhinoCam2 tutorial for this model, click on the link:

The Milling.

The Model.

As an overall analysis of Design Studio I “ZEBAR” Project, the assignment claimed for a 3D model of Barcelona.  Following the admistrative subdivisions of the city, a digital 2D CAD format map was created by tracing closed polylines for streets, blocks and buildings.  It was decided that the entire city would be considered flat and only the topography of the most important mountains (Montjuic, Collserola, El Carmel) would be shown since the scale is 1:2000 and not all details would be seen.

Rhino file

Therefore, the printing was separated into 2 parts, the flat and the topography, in our case Ronda del Dalt street was the subdivision element. Having decided that, the extrusion of all the buildings was done considering that each floor is 3.5m high. The blocks were extruded to a 0.3cm height and the base 3cm due to the thickness of the material.  After receiving the topography treated with RhinoTerrain plugin, we had to place the buildings on it. We placed them above the terrain and then individually chose Curve>Curve from Objects>Duplicate Edges. Selecting each edge of the base of the building, we joined the lines and hit Project. Click on the terrain to project the curve on the topography. Then we moved vertically the building to the lowest point in the terrain so the building would be placed inside it.Then “Boolean union” all the buildings, blocks, and streets in order to create one single object. Eventually Create a mesh of the object by applying the command “mesh” and place the model on a sheet size is 1990 x 990 mm. Since our barrio is a big area, we have to split the area into 2 parts in order to fit into the sheet.

Buildings on Collserola Mountain

In order to materialize the 3d model we chose foam and milled with the CNC milling machine. The file was first prepared to be read by the machine through a simulation of the milling using Rhino Cam. To start milling, we used 2 tools with different diameters. First 3cm tool to take out the excessive material, and then 26mm to give detail into the map.

Foam Model milled with different tools

Saint Gervasi milled

During the milling process, the northern part of our area was only engraved and not milled. After sometime working on the file to find the mistake we realized that some meshes were open and invalid through the command Analyze>Edge Tools> Show Edges. We used the command CloseCrv to close all the polylines and redid the extrusions and meshes. Finally with Command “What” we knew there was no more invalid meshes and the file was ready to be reprinted.