Custom .GHAs for Grasshopper

Hi guys,

Few questions regarding the creation of custom .GHAs:

Is there a problem to create custom .NET components for Grasshopper?

Is there a problem to share these tools with the community?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Damien Alomar on November 24, 2009 at 8:23am

Grasshopper is "open" enough to create your own grasshopper components. However, there are several issues that come along with this. First of all, there's no documentation, so the people who know how to create them have gotten the information directly from David. This is fine for the very few people that have gotten this information, but without any documentation, making that information public is a good way to eat up all of David's time. The second issue is that Grasshopper is changing with each release, so this means having to constantly update components and having people download and install them.

At this point its just a matter of time. David has always been wanting to offer an SDK for grasshopper, so there is definitely the intent to get it out there. GH just has to be more stable (development wise) and documentation has to be put together.

Permalink Reply by Morphocode on November 24, 2009 at 9:34am

Sounds good! That means we could create our own components for GH and it's not prohibited to release them as a .gha file.
However, we have to deal with the lack of documentation and the changes in every release...

Is that right?

Permalink Reply by Damien Alomar on November 24, 2009 at 9:52am

At this point, there's NO documentation, so there's nothing anywhere telling you how to do it. So you'd have to be able to sit down with David and have him go through the steps with you. AFAIK there are very few people who have been able to get that information from him (myself and the guys from StudioMODE are the only ones I know of). Not that he's deliberately being secretive, its just that at the moment putting that information out there causes more harm than good.

I would be patient, but I wouldn't expect any progression towards offering up the necessary information for at least 9 months if not more. If Rajaa puts out a panelling tools component then that will be a better indication that documentation for custom components are on their way.

Permalink Reply by Morphocode on November 24, 2009 at 10:01am

Hi Damien,

What is good to hear is that it's legal to create an extension of Grasshopper.

We've already created our own components and we're wondering if it's OK to share them with the community as a plug-in for Grasshopper

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