Component reference for GH

Hi all! I am a GH newbie (although a professional programmer) and I needed a full searchable and browsable list of GH components (documentation), which I could not find anywhere. So, to help myself and everybody, I built this GH component reference site by extracting the list of GH components a while ago.

The advantage of such a list is you can find a component when you know what you want, and don't know the terminology that GH uses. For example to delete/remove items from a list, in GH the term is "cull". Patterns are known as "arrays". While these may be common to GH experts, it takes a while to figure out, and a full component list helps you learn these quickly.

I wanted feedback about this site, and to start discussion about docs in general. AFAIK, docs are largely missing in GH, save the "search" function available within the GH editor. What do you all think? Would you find such a website useful? Would you like it if such docs were integrated into the GH website itself?

Thanks

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Harsh Gupta on May 4, 2016 at 2:51am

Please note that I have a semi-automated process to extract command info and icons from GH, so addons can be added too. If anyone has addons with especially useful commands, please message me or reply here and I'll add the addon into the site.

Permalink Reply by Nik Willmore on May 7, 2016 at 1:13am

Plugins I like to have:

FabTools

TSplines (not free)

Peacock

Phyllomachine

FlowL

Spiderweb

MeshTools

MinSurf

Hoopsnake

Anenome

Dodo

Weaverbird

Bowerbird

Panda

Millipede

Paneling Tools

Kangaroo

Kangaroo II

SPM (particles)

MeshPlus (M+)

Lunchbox

Alba

ASTools

Human

TT Toolbox

Bengesht

Sandbox

Sl (Starling)

Nudibranch

gHowl

Animation

IntraLattice

SmartForm

EdiTree

Voronoy3D (sic)

StudioAVW

There are several others that appear in the normal mesh and surface etc. tabs that I honestly don't know the names of since I can't tell which are not in fact native. Mesh Pipe is one that sneaks in there.

There should be a good practices rule for aspie programmers to list this information in the right click help entry for any non-native component. It's very bad for making a first impression on a client when your script doesn't work and you in fact have no idea where a given component came from so you have to search for it just as you were hoping for a "wow" factor from them instead. This is exactly why your project is absolutely critical, it solves that problem in a single reference. I hope you could automate it after just installing every damn plugin you can find out there, including stuff from Milk Box, which seems to be a common problem of my thinking something is native:

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/group/milkbox

Permalink Reply by Harsh Gupta on May 7, 2016 at 11:59pm

The trouble is not so much installing plugins as it is downloading them. Maybe its just me, but the GH addons site (food4rhino) is awfully slow. I'll think about a way people can add their own plugins, maybe an online upload form or such and such.

Alternatively, I'll go and download your list of plugins and add them to the docs semi-automatically (read:manually with a few automated tools); something I don't mind doing provided they are somewhat stable.

Do you think they change often? like every week? then it would become tedious to go on updating them by hand and a fully-automated thing would be required.

Also, I though the GH site was full of half-baked stuff. It seems every aspiring GH dev is releasing his own plugins, thats why I only wanted to add the "good" ones; is there such a thing? or are all plugins good and useful and non-buggy so deserve to be "featured"?

Permalink Reply by Harsh Gupta on May 8, 2016 at 6:28am

The following are added to the docs site!

Thanks for the recommendations!

- SpiderWeb, 4.2
- MinSurf, 3.0.0.2
- Kangaroo2, 2.1.2
- SPM, 0.1.0.3
- ASTools, 0.702b
- Human, 3-24-2016
- TreeFrog, 3-24-2016
- Sandbox Topology, 0.1.000.1
- Starling, 0.2
- NudiBranch, 001
- IntraLattice, 0.7.6
- SmartForm, 1.0
- EdiTree, 1.0.0.0
- Millipede, 1.0
- Bowerbird, 0.6.3
- Anemone, 0.4
- TSplines, 2.3
- Meshtools, 1.0

-------------------------------------

FAILS

The following crashed my converter.. I found a way to develop a much more robust method. I'll work on it soon...

- gHowl, 0.1.r50.0
- Clipper, 0.2.1
- Bengesht, 3.0.0.0
- Hoopsnake, 0.6.7
- Dodo, 1.0.2.0
- Panda, 1.1
- Paneling Tools, 2014.12.17.01
- Lunchbox, 2016.3.21
- MeshPlus, 2.1.00
- Weaverbird, 0.9.0.1

- Alba, 0.111

- FabTools, 0.92
- Peacock, 1.0
- Phyllomachine, 1.0
- TT Toolbox, 1.7
- Xylinus, 0.2

The following I could not find:
- Animation
- Kangaroo II
- Voronoy3D (sic)

Permalink Reply by Nik Willmore on May 8, 2016 at 10:25am

Kangaroo II:

http://www.food4rhino.com/project/kangaroo?ufh

That page has Kangaroo 2.X which is Kangaroo II, but Kangaroo 1.X is not obsolete, not just an old version, but a different plug-in still very much in use and useful especially since it contains unique MeshMachine. So likely you do have Kangaroo II, but in fact lack Kangaroo I.

Permalink Reply by Nik Willmore on May 8, 2016 at 10:32am

Voronoi3D turns out is a slow cluster I found here, not a streamlined plug-in, and suffers from a typo in the component name:

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/forum/topics/3d-voronoi-4

Permalink Reply by Nik Willmore on May 8, 2016 at 11:05am

What I saw labeled Animation was in fact Centipede:

http://www.food4rhino.com/project/centipede?ufh

Permalink Reply by Harsh Gupta on May 9, 2016 at 1:55am

Thanks, I'll check those out.

Did you see theupdated website? It has a new theme which I need some feedback on. Regards.

Permalink Reply by Nik Willmore on May 9, 2016 at 2:49am

Wonderful format for an iPhone, no complaints to offer.

Permalink Reply by Harsh Gupta on May 10, 2016 at 12:15am

Wow, that's great! What a coincidence that 320px columns work well! I don't even have an iPhone to check out such stuff. Thanks for the super detailed feedback, screenshot an' all!

Permalink Reply by Harsh Gupta on May 10, 2016 at 4:18am

I got the new method functional so adding plugins should be like 5 minutes of work from now on! The following were added today, go check it out! And there are many, many fixes and improvements so many more components will be displayed even in the system collection.

Newly added:

- Clipper

- Panda

- Paneling Tools

- Weaverbird

- LunchBox

- Bengesht

- gHowl

- FlowLines

Permalink Reply by Nik Willmore on May 9, 2016 at 3:00am

The T-Splines version is very old, the latest being 4.