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There are many many many dedicated grasshopper modeling channels, both in the “watch and chill” style and the explanatory style. Once you’ve done lots of grassh

by szvsw 2y ago

There are many many many dedicated grasshopper modeling channels, both in the “watch and chill” style and the explanatory style. Once you’ve done lots of grasshopper programming and can recognize component icons from both the base library and the cornucopia of grasshopper plugins, you can skip through all of those videos at like 3x speed and very rapidly absorb the graph structure. One of the most interesting parts of grasshopper is how components operate over tree based data structures - ie the equivalent of numpy broadcasting.

jitl 2y ago
Awesome! I had no idea, for some reason I just assumed this niche topic no one was interested in. Do you have any recommendations for how to learn grasshopper for a casual like me who only feels comfortable in SketchUp?
- szvsw 2y ago
  It really really depends on what your goals are and what type of design domain you are working in, eg jewelry, architecture (and what within architecture), fabrication, experimental sculpture, etc. At the end of the day though… play. Lots of play! Playing within Grasshopper and just making crazy things is a great way to build intuition. at the same time, it of course is very helpful to have directional play, ie problem solving, frequently in the form of trying to recreate - or parametrize/generalize/abstract - a specific pre-existing design. It also helps a lot if you are pretty familiar with modeling in rhino (ie working with construction planes, curves, etc) since a lot of grasshopper worker is just a matter of formally capturing a sequence of operations that you might perform in Rhino into a codified DAG. Unfortunately some of the naming of rhino operations does not align with their corresponding grasshopper components (and the corresponding components might not perfectly align their api with the corresponding rhino commands) but developing that geometric intuition is essential. There’s also some stuff that is ultimately more efficient to program within python / CSharp / Visual Basic within grasshopper so always keep that in mind… but it can become another layer of complexity (or simplification…) to learn at the same time.

by szvsw 2y ago

jitl 2y ago

Awesome! I had no idea, for some reason I just assumed this niche topic no one was interested in. Do you have any recommendations for how to learn grasshopper for a casual like me who only feels comfortable in SketchUp?

szvsw 2y ago
It really really depends on what your goals are and what type of design domain you are working in, eg jewelry, architecture (and what within architecture), fabrication, experimental sculpture, etc. At the end of the day though… play. Lots of play! Playing within Grasshopper and just making crazy things is a great way to build intuition. at the same time, it of course is very helpful to have directional play, ie problem solving, frequently in the form of trying to recreate - or parametrize/generalize/abstract - a specific pre-existing design. It also helps a lot if you are pretty familiar with modeling in rhino (ie working with construction planes, curves, etc) since a lot of grasshopper worker is just a matter of formally capturing a sequence of operations that you might perform in Rhino into a codified DAG. Unfortunately some of the naming of rhino operations does not align with their corresponding grasshopper components (and the corresponding components might not perfectly align their api with the corresponding rhino commands) but developing that geometric intuition is essential. There’s also some stuff that is ultimately more efficient to program within python / CSharp / Visual Basic within grasshopper so always keep that in mind… but it can become another layer of complexity (or simplification…) to learn at the same time.