Sending Geometry from Grasshopper to Unity (incl IOS, Android, Mac, Linux...etc) in realtime (almost).

I've been experimenting with the way how to send the geometry generated in Grasshopper to external application such as Unity "as it is" so that one may control and view any kinds of parametric geometry on mobile devices such as iPhone.

Here's the result.

Send/Receive data between Grasshopper to Unity in realtime from Orange Jellies on Vimeo.

Send/Receive data between Grasshopper to iPhone in realtime from Orange Jellies on Vimeo.

Technically I'm using following technology in order to communicate between Grasshopper and Unity.

Protocol Buffers (for serializing mesh object)
node.js (for server)
socket.io (for communication protocol)

This example is using a websocket so you could possibly control the geometry over the internet. I've also tried setting a node server on a raspberry pi to test and it worked just fine (a bit slow though).

This is just an example of communicating between Grasshopper and Unity but the same technique could be used for any kind of applications such as processing, openFrameworks, vvvv, max msp...etc.

I was wondering if this is useful for anybody else...

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Lukasz Domagala on January 27, 2016 at 6:11am

Hi Junichiro

I've been looking into something like this but never thought about using unity/ue for this porpoise.

I'd love to get more info on it!

Permalink Reply by Rafael Vargas on December 8, 2016 at 1:13pm

Hello, This would be extremely useful for a project we are developing in Puerto Rico. Is there anyway of contacting you to know some more details?

Permalink Reply by Juan Pablo Ugarte on May 5, 2017 at 7:34pm

Hi Junichiro,

This is pretty cool. Would you be willing to share your definition? I would like to use part of it for a school project. Let me know!

Best,

Juan Pablo

Permalink Reply by Mahmoud Meligy on February 2, 2018 at 3:01am

Hi Junichiro,

Would you explain/share the C# components that receive and parse the mesh in Unity as well as the components for sending the sliders output in Unity to Grasshopper?

Thanks!

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