One of the stand-out messages from Grasshopper was McNeel linking the modelling to fabrication. This liberal attitude permeates through McNeel’s business model and means the company is very customer focussed, leading to a very active user community. Globally, Bob McNeel knows of 12,000 active Grasshopper customers, 90% of which are architects but admits there may well be more as users do not have to register to download. Algorithms and manipulators are dragged, dropped and connected, as if they were being wired together like effects pedals.
Grasshopper works within Rhino and uses standard Rhino geometry but has its own slick interface window. It is about as easy as it gets to use but still requires a methodology and understanding of geometry to get a desired result. At first Grasshopper was very simple but, based on user feedback, it now allows for very complete systems, including the ability for expert users to extend the system with C# and Visual Basic components.” “Grasshopper is a way for designers to look at design problems as a set of sophisticated relationships and to map those relationships graphically and programmatically into a system that allows them to interactively play with alternatives. So more and more designers were asking for scripting training… but then they hated it once they figured out how tedious coding was. It seemed like most bigger firms have a few ‘scripting geeks’ that could not keep up with the designers’ demands.
Writing code is not something designers really want to get their head into. NET, or C++ code was the only way to do that in Rhino. “During the design process, designers set-up sophisticated relationships between the parts of the design problem. Aimed at the emerging generative shape designers, Grasshopper is tightly integrated into Rhino and allows the user to interactively drive geometry via a plug and play interface, removing the need for learning the RhinoScript language.īob McNeel said that Grasshopper was developed as an attempt to make scripting more accessible to users that wanted generative modelling tools.
The latest enhancement is called Grasshopper and comes free of charge while it is in development.
McNeel has developed a number of Rhino add-ons and plug-ins, mainly offering additional broad-functionality for rendering and animation in the guise of other animals ‘Penguin’ and ‘Flamingo’, as well as ‘Bongo’ and ‘Brazil’. However, Rhino is developed to be a non-industry specific surface modelling tool, at home designing a yacht, a ring, a shoe or a skyscraper it produces surfaces that are useful for all designers. Bob McNeel, the man behind McNeel and Associates, developer of Rhino, estimates that it possibly has around 50,000 architectural users worldwide. Rhino has played a predominant role within that move to 3D because of its low cost, ease of use and powerful feature set. Guggenheim Foundation and the St Petersburg-based State Hermitage Museum. This will be the new centre for international art house pieces from collections of both the New York-based Solomon R. Zaha Hadid’s Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, Vilnius.