Grasshopper and Rhinoscript differences

Hi

I am new to Grasshopper and I still have not really clear what the real uses of this tool are.

Could you tell me what are the differences between RhinoScript and Grasshopper?

Can Grasshopper do all what is possible to do with Rhinoscript and viceversa?
The all point of GH is that makes it easier to write scripts thx to a fancy graphic interface?

I wonder if RhinoScript is still a usefull tool to learn or if I can concentrate all the efforts on GH

Thanks for any clarification

Sergio

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on February 17, 2013 at 12:29pm

Hi Sergio,

Grasshopper, like RhinoScript, is not really 'for' anything. It's a development platform that allows you to automate certain tasks. RhinoScript accomplishes this by exposing the VBScript language inside Rhino and providing a lot of special functions to deal with geometry and layers and materials and stuff.

Where RhinoScript is based on VBScript, Grasshopper is based on the node-editor concept, which is a visual programming paradigm as opposed to a textual one. Grasshopper however does provide ways to enter textual code using either the VB.NET, C# or Python languages.

The biggest different between RhinoScript and Grasshopper is that RhinoScript deals with geometry inside the Rhino document. Curves in RhinoScript are always actual curve objects that have a layer, potentially a name, a dash-pattern a colour etc. etc. Grasshopper maintains its own geometry which is drawn in the Rhino viewports but not part of the Rhino 3DM file.

So depending on what you want to do it might make more sense to opt for one platform over the other.

Skills are not very transferable between RS and GH though, but at least GH makes it fairly easy to start typing C# and VB code using the RhinoCommon SDK, whereas this is not as smooth a transition from RhinoScript.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by sylvester on February 17, 2013 at 4:02pm