Changing Canvas & Grid Color / Disable Grid

Hey everyone,

I recently had a special problem - for our lecture, I wanted to record a video with the GH definition in the foreground and the Rhino viewport in the background. However, making the canvas transparent proved to be quite difficult, especially because of the grid in the background.

As it has been discussed on the forum a couple times, the Grasshopper color settings are stored in the grasshopper_gui.xml file, so you can just open the file in Notepad and edit it.

For keying, I generally use an ugly pink (with grid disabled) and for working with GH I prefer a grey background with a slightly visible grid - anyway, I didn't want to restart GH whenever I changed from one "mode" to the other, so I just wrote a small C# script to deal with that.

Just a quick advice: In GH, go to "File/Special Folders/Settings Folder" and backup your grasshopper_gui.xml file as the changes are saved to it. If you delete it, GH will automatically create a new one with default settings the next time you start it.

Perhaps some of you have a use for it as well...!

Regards, Johannes

P.S.: The ghx file contains the code as a scripting component while the gha file is a custom component which you would have to copy into the Components directory. They do exactly the same thing!

Attachments:

change_gui.gha, 12 KB
change_gui.ghx, 35 KB

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Evert Amador on December 1, 2010 at 4:03pm

This is great!

Thanks a lot for sharing it. Cheers

Evert

Permalink Reply by Andrea Polato on December 1, 2010 at 5:30pm

Thanks for sharing.
Let's pimp our interface!

Bye

Andrea.

Permalink Reply by Guille on December 1, 2010 at 5:50pm

sweet! lets make grasshopper look like a teenager myspace page

Permalink Reply by Johannes Braumann on December 1, 2010 at 5:58pm

Great idea! We could have a different color each time the definition is refreshed...
Or use the timer component to make a blinking background with alternating neon colors... The possibilities are endless! :)

... with some more lolcats components we could even aim at the geocities look!

Permalink Reply by Alpha222 on December 2, 2010 at 7:47am

Interesting and thanks for sharing !!

I remember David writed one similar component but not released it out ...

Permalink Reply by kleerkoat on December 2, 2010 at 8:06am

that is very nice, thanks for sharing!

Permalink Reply by ddelgiu on December 2, 2010 at 8:10am

How I can make invisible canvas as shown in the video?

Permalink Reply by Johannes Braumann on December 2, 2010 at 8:37am

This is a postprocessing effect, I made a video of the canvas and the viewport next to each other. Then I used a bluebox-like effect to make the canvas invisible and superimposed them. The "Ultra Key" in Premiere works great.
I never tried making the canvas transparent, you could try setting the canvas_back in the grasshopper_gui.xml to transparent (the first value, it's ARGB) but I doubt that the canvas would let the viewport look through. Can't try it myself at the moment, though.

Regards,

Johannes

Edit: I asked a friend to try it on his machine, a fully transparent canvas produces strange tearing artefacts - no transparency to the viewport, though.

Permalink Reply by ddelgiu on December 2, 2010 at 8:46am

Nice trick! Ok, I will try asap.
Thanks for sharing and for quick reply.

Permalink Reply by kleerkoat on December 2, 2010 at 9:29am

doesn't seem like it works.

I'm not complaining though, but that would be super nice to have a transparent canvas.

Permalink Reply by oarlus on August 4, 2012 at 9:47am

Thanks,

i wonder why even in the 0.9 version are not such controls.

How can i reset on default ?

Maybe a default component option will be great if you update it...

Permalink Reply by Johannes Braumann on August 4, 2012 at 9:58am

Hello,
I'm currently in SE-Asia, far away from any Grasshopper... However, I think that you just have to delete the according XML (grasshopper_gui.xml?) file and Grasshopper will create a new one with the default values!
Best,
Johannes