Experimenting with Grasshopper
7This video was made as part of an experiment for an architectural design studio. It's one of my first times using both Grasshopper and Rhino, so I'm very probably doing things very slowly by the standards of people more familiar with them. The video was captured over about 2.5 hours with a program called Chronolapse.
The program used is Rhinoceros 4.0 Trial with all modelling being done through a plugin called Grasshopper. Both are free for download.
Music is a remix by ProtoDome from from http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02153
Here's the description of what I was doing from my blog:
"Shortly into the video, I decided to give myself something to try to achieve by the end of it - a twisted rectangular prism shape with rectangles along it representing floors. Looking back over it and playing a little more with Grasshopper, I noticed there are a few tools I could possibly have used to make the final form much faster.
However, the main point of this stage of my computer modelling experiment is to get myself familiar with Grasshopper, rather than efficiently producing an end result in one go. As with any experiment, the criterion of success is what is learnt.
The main sticking point was when it came to combining two lists of transforms - one list of rotations, one list of translations - so that I'd get one list of transforms that each represented a rotation and translation. I found out how to combine an entire list of transforms into a single transform, but that was the closest I could get. So, in a bit of desperation and having never before programmed in VB.NET, I fiddled wildly with it in a script until I got my head around how Grasshopper let you handle its parameters and "output" - which is really just any variables passed by reference rather than by value.
The next sticking point was that I couldn't find an object reference that would drastically speed up the rate at which I could throw together the script. I noticed the IDE had an autocomplete list that would pop up as you wrote your script, but it wasn't really comprehensive enough for me to know what each variable or method in the list was for. After Googling for a while and finding nothing, I resorted to looking in the plugin folder for Grasshopper, and found RhinoCommon.xml under Plug-ins/Grasshopper/rh_common/RhinoCommon.xml (relative to the Rhino install folder). You'll probably see a few flashes of it opened in Chrome in the video once I upload it. It was somewhat helpful because I could easily Ctrl+F and enter the name of the type I wanted, and hit Ctrl+G until I found it. Admittedly, that took quite a few Ctrl+Gs at times, but on the way, I was finding a few useful tidbits here and there.
After I got past that point - and a few sundry errors to do with invalid typecasting of Transform to Vector3 - it was fairly smooth sailing."
Other Videos By nesis
| 2012-04-01 | Making an Object Look at the Mouse |
| 2012-04-01 | Changing the Mesh Used in a 3rd Person Character Controller in Unity3D |
| 2012-04-01 | Importing an Animated Object in Unity3D |
| 2012-03-20 | Rotate an Object Using the Mouse |
| 2012-03-20 | Making a Character You Can Control in Unity3D (pre Unity 4.0.0f!) |
| 2012-03-20 | Camera Control in Unity3D |
| 2012-03-20 | Lighting a Scene in Unity3D |
| 2011-06-10 | Making a Site Model and Generating a Building Form (Work in Progress) |
| 2011-06-02 | City Generator Experiment documentation. |
| 2011-05-19 | Experimenting with Grasshopper 2 |
| 2011-05-17 | Experimenting with Grasshopper |
| 2011-01-14 | Modelling a NES Controller Case Mod |
| 2011-01-13 | Playing around with BuildAR |
| 2010-11-20 | Making a Game in Under 48 Hours |