Interactive modelling

Hello,

I'm coming to the end of a project on grasshopper, which in a nutshell is a mass customization project.

I have two problems.

Is there a way see the rendered object in rhino without baking? As the object will evolve from one design to the next, if the object is baked then how can I delete this bake, so that the next bake can be seen solely.

This problem would not be the case if I could understand how to use a programme such as generator, which I am failing to simply open. Perhaps it supports an old grasshopper? Any advice here? Or for an alternative way to produce this outcome...

http://www.nucleusdream.com/index.php/it/iring-configuratore

The solution does not need to be online, simply an interactive outcome. In it's simplest form that would be a cleaner version of grasshopper alongside a changing render.

Or is the answer an interactive animation?

Any help, greatly appreciated.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on April 4, 2014 at 8:59am

Hi Alice,

you can use an object like the [Geometry Cache] to easily bake geometry and then replace it later with new geometry. It will automatically delete all previous objects. Though be careful, if you copy the baked geometry, those copies may also be deleted automatically.

Other than that there are no tools in standard Grasshopper for this sort of thing. There are however several plugins for Grasshopper which automate baking.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Permalink Reply by Alice Holmes on April 4, 2014 at 9:06am

Thanks David,

could you recommend these plugins and I can check them out.

Permalink Reply by Alice Holmes on April 4, 2014 at 9:42am

I'm also struggling to use geometry cache in this way whilst also fishing through the many plugins for grasshopper!

Permalink Reply by Michael Makris on April 7, 2014 at 3:55pm

Alice,

I needed to do the same thing a few weeks back. Put together this little workflow using only a few simple tools. You'll need to download Lunchbox if you don't have it. It's one of the plugins available for download here. As David suggested in a previous post, make sure to use the Ctrl+B command on the delete function to make sure it deletes the old items before the new ones.

I'm attaching the GH file too so you can copy+paste it.

Let me know if you get it working!

Attachments:

Reset.gh, 11 KB

Permalink Reply by Alice Holmes on April 8, 2014 at 4:50am

Thanks Michael,

I took Andrew's advice into action yesterday and works perfectly. The set up automatically bakes, deletes and rebakes. So that's great.

I have then used something called sticky previews.
It's a total shortcut for now. With this I can place a screen of the rendered object on top of the grasshopper screen or excel screen. This way specific aspects of gh can be on screen to be modified and a changing render on rhino is in shot.

I have some advice to take generator forward, hopefully in a couple of weeks I can work on it!

Permalink Reply by Michael Makris on April 8, 2014 at 10:05am

I may have misunderstood. I thought you didn't want continuous baking but rather baking at the push of a button only.

I made that process so I could play with the object manually in Rhino, change it using Rhino tools, and Grasshopper would follow my changes. Then, if I needed to reset to an original state, pushing the button allows me to and all my changes are undone.

Permalink Reply by Alice Holmes on April 8, 2014 at 10:35am

continuous baking is what I need. as the values in grasshopper are changed the object evolves in rhino.
it's just a shame, as I don't think it's possible to apply materials onto the object in this process. just colour?

Permalink Reply by Michael Makris on April 8, 2014 at 10:53am

see Andrew's answer. It appears that Human can definitely do that.

Permalink Reply by Andrew Heumann on April 8, 2014 at 12:22pm

Yes, materials are very much possible with human. I typically assign materials by layer, and use "Create attributes" to tell the bake component which layer to put geometry onto. If you prefer to have everything on the same layer, you can also specify a material name in the same Create Attributes component. If materials need to be dynamic, you can create them from within grasshopper with the "Create/Modify Materials" component. Hope that helps!

Permalink Reply by Alice Holmes on April 9, 2014 at 3:57am

sounds very promising!

with this method is it possible to assign different materials to different breps?

do these materials run through the layers created in rhino?

I'm stuck at this point...

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