Tales of a GH addict....

Yesterday I found myself reaching for the Grasshopper fix for a very unlikely job.

A colleague asked me if I could quickly combine some data together into a spreadsheet rather than him copy and pasting hundreds of files. Normally I would simply write a VBA macro in Excel and be commended for being a life saver for doing this in under half an hour. I found myself opening Rhino/Grasshopper and achieving the same results in under 5 minutes. He then got me to do the calculations he was going to do in Excel as well (Note the explanations are for the benefit of my work colleague)

Here's the definition:As you can see I have only used components from 3 native tabs (Params, Math, Sets) and gHowl for the spreadsheet writer.

This got me wondering. "Is there scope for a stand alone Grasshopper IDE Lite version that doesn't need Rhino and any geometry components?" and "How many others have used Grasshopper for none Rhino purposes?"

Any thoughts?

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Hi my name is Danny and I am a gh addict.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by phillip on July 10, 2012 at 4:08am

I´d love to do my (overdue) taxes like that...

Permalink Reply by Luis Fraguada on July 10, 2012 at 4:19am

I fire it up many times to do things that have nothing to do with Rhino...mostly for processing data as you have shown, and many times for a quick prototyping of API interfaces...

Permalink Reply by Danny Boyes on July 10, 2012 at 4:31am

Hi Luis,

many times for a quick prototyping of API interfaces...

Have you got anything you can share as an example?

Permalink Reply by Marios Tsiliakos on July 10, 2012 at 4:26am

Danny,

I have also experienced a similar situation when I had to make a spreadsheet to calculate some funds for a project. I was already working on gh so I thought "what the heck, why opening a new program??"

The process was simpler than yours but I believe that the main advantage of this process was that I could directly project the result graphically into the rhino viewport. My colleagues were all designers, so the were all particularly excited. I highly doubt the fact that this could have the same effect on an accountant for example.

Is the purpose of GH just to associate and output data? Or is it also to create a visual representation of this data, and make it available to non programmers?

the "Under 5 minutes" is quite appealing though. I am not much of an excel guy so I trust you on that.

Hi my name is Marios and I am a GH addict.

Permalink Reply by Danny Boyes on July 10, 2012 at 4:30am

Hi Marios.

I think the advantages of GH over the VBA method was:

1) the complete lack of any need to code For loops

2) the ability to view the results as you went along

Both of which greatly reduced the overhead in time.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on July 10, 2012 at 12:26pm

Any thoughts?

Although I hate having to put it so crassly; how would RMA benefit from this? The only reason that RMA can afford to fund the development of Grasshopper is precisely because it does need Rhino to run.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on July 10, 2012 at 12:27pm

ps. Love the example though and yes I do myself often use Grasshopper to test a new algorithm, geometry or no geometry.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by David Stasiuk on July 10, 2012 at 12:36pm

...well, RMA could sell datahopper or whatever you wanted to call it.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on July 10, 2012 at 1:02pm

I'm afraid it's not as simple as that. We'd have to find new customers who are completely outside our current network who'd be willing to pay enough for it to cover our marketing, distribution and development costs. It's a pretty risky gambit.

It's very difficult to make a serious profit by selling software because so many people are willing to write software for free.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by Ángel Linares on July 10, 2012 at 1:15pm

Mmm...ok...and what about let grasshopper run without run rhino? We only need a 3d OGL window to preview geometry (if we want to create geometry...). Grasshopper check that Rhino is installed and licensed and then run.

I know that lot of dependencies and code structures are not compatible with this idea, but is not as radical as DataHopper I think...You are not selling a new software, it's the same with a standalone (but linked in license) option. This could open the possibility of Android or iOS interfaces (wet dream for someone else?)

PS.: Nice example Dani, I've done some data processing with grasshopper too. Very fast and intuitive better than code VB scripts excel.

Permalink Reply by David Stasiuk on July 10, 2012 at 1:55pm

Well, fwiw, I wasn't really suggesting that it would be easy or simple. ;)

Permalink Reply by Michael Pryor on July 10, 2012 at 2:12pm

I have used it for complex math problem, simply because being able to visualize the calculations and not have to clear the calculator if a mistake is made is pretty handy.