The Monoceros Story
How a research project at Subdigital studio became the most widely used Wave Function Collapse plug-in for architecture.
Monoceros was born at Subdigital, a computational design studio that embraced the power of algorithms to create architecture, design, and art. The team built software solutions for complex design tasks, using parametric tools to push manufacturing technologies to their limits.
That focus on novel, innovative approaches to architectural challenges led directly to the research that would become Monoceros.
In the summer of 2020, a group of authors - Ján Pernecký, Tomáš Tholt, Ján Tóth, Michaela Krpalová, Kristýna Uhrová, Hugo Fekar, Alexander Kupko, Eva Kvaššayová, Miriam Loescher and Ľuba Ondrejkovičová - prepared a research project, the result of which is a proposal to adapt the mathematical method / algorithm Wave Function Collapse for architectural design purposes.
The subject of Subdigital Summer School 2020 was a current and near-future big topic in computational design: prefabrication and discrete design. The early objectives were to identify the present state of the discrete design scene, as well as to learn and channel the mindset and principles of the Wave Function Collapse algorithm while developing a comprehensive software tool that would support such design processes.
WFC, unlike aggregation methods, inherently creates interwoven rhizomatic structures. It almost does not rely on randomness and offers a solution rather than its simulacrum. It creates global complexity while exposing clear local rules.
WFC fills an entire segment of space with repeating prefab elements, while making sure they connect to each other properly and organize according to given rules. WFC creates diversity and complexity while maintaining the expected properties.
WFC allows building various objects in multiple scales out of a limited number of prefab element types, securing their compatibility and coherence of the resulting assembly. With a limited number of prefab elements, it is possible to build an unlimited number of customized objects, which will have the expected functional and structural properties.
Within the span of summer months, we consulted our progress with guest specialists of various backgrounds. With their help we acquired insight from a theoretical and academic point of view, through the view of software developers. We met and discussed with technologists and professionals in computational design, digital fabrication and robotics, as well as end-user specialists, on interdisciplinary collaborations between art and the tech community, and UX professionals.
- Imro Vaško / UMPRUM
- Shota Tsikoliya / UMPRUM
- Martin Kossuth / MORE
- Aldo Sollazzo / Noumena / IAAC
- Michal Hladký / EHMKK 2013
- Lucia Dubačová / Sensorium
- Martin Uhrík / DataLab
- Roman Hajtmanek / DataLab
- Alessio Erioli / Co-de-iT
What started as a summer research project has grown into the most widely used Wave Function Collapse plug-in for architecture. Monoceros has been downloaded more than 22,000 times from Food4Rhino and is used at universities across Europe, Australia, and North America.
Monoceros 3 is a full rewrite built on everything we learned from version 1. It ships with a high-performance Rust solver that uses backtracking to solve hard problems in a single attempt, bitmask-based constraint propagation, support for up to 16,370 distinct Modules, heterogeneous grids, per-slot module weights, and a comprehensive library of Grasshopper components.