The Mutant Trees were designed by Chris Doray studios for permanent exhibition at the Shannon Wall Centre Kerrisdale, a luxury condominium and townhome development in Vancouver, British Columbia. The display consists of eight – fifty foot tall steel fabricated trees to be planted amongst the current woodland. The surface of the tree is comprised entirely of triangular plates. This surface will be finished in a glossy pearl white and the tree branches are illuminated with LED lighting as shown in the artist’s rendering.
A consistent approach was required for modeling the over 500 triangular surface plates due to a client instruction to ensure the part mark was scribed to the interior and orientated to the top of the tree. This would allow for easy orientation during fabrication, while hiding the scribe mark from public viewing.
We developed an application using Tekla’s API to first collect all of the exterior work points into a data table which was used to allow consistent error free modeling of the surface plates in a top first clockwise method. This ensured all part drawings and dxf files were drawn or orientated in a consistent manner and the scribe mark was located correctly.