Pain Points in Grasshopper

(Edit. David sez: Please append your (well explained) ideas/suggestions/wishes. I don't care much for what you want, I care why you want it.)

Perhaps this topic has been covered recently, but I don't see any active threads. We're looking for a plugin project and I'd like to get some feedback from the power users before choosing something.

So...

What is missing from grasshopper?

What would you like to connect to that you can't already connect to?

What kind of bottlenecks do you run into?

What secret wish do you have for Grasshopper that doesn't even seem possible?

What project have you been meaning to undertake but haven't had/won't have the time?

Just trying to brainstorm a few ideas here. There are so many great and useful plugins out there, it's hard to discover the gaps anymore.

Looking forward to your thoughts!

Cheers,

Marc

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Nate Holland on August 6, 2014 at 1:41pm

If you hold crtl+shift you can left click and drag all the wires coming out of an output to another component

Permalink Reply by Joshua Jordan on August 6, 2014 at 1:43pm

ding ding ding

Permalink Reply by Thomas Perkov on September 14, 2014 at 6:36am

(shortcut "fix") Ctrl + ALT + LMB - Should work with Python- and usercomponent too.

why? Because it's annoys me that I can't find some categories instant! ;-) hehe

Permalink Reply by Nick Tyrer on September 16, 2014 at 5:46am

Could we please have a saved 'Swatch Set', that can be set as default/shared between gh files. (similar to Photoshop)

For the purposes of labelling definitions that may be used by several people in my office i use colour coding of groups, object previews or even individual sliders. Obviously its not difficult to do manually, but its slow to find the correct colour each time using eye dropper or writing specific rgb values. It would make life easier, and make definitions look alot more cohesive and attractive.

Thanks

Permalink Reply by Bruno Galvao on September 24, 2014 at 2:44pm

Something I'd really love to see in grasshopper is some sort of simple spreadsheet interface.

I'd can think of a couple useful things to do with it, and i'm sure there can be plenty. Somethings like:

A expression editor-like spreadsheet component.

A Panel like component for visualization of data

Having that would definetely help the grasshopper-spreadsheet software exporting also.

But then, maybe it's just me !

Bruno

Permalink Reply by Oswald Pfeiffer on September 27, 2014 at 11:53am

I'd like to see inputs on the graph mapper for the X/Y domains values.
Also why not inputs on sliders. (to change min/max values dynamically and avoid out of index errors for example).

Permalink Reply by Dimitar Baldzhiev on October 30, 2014 at 3:27pm

You don't really need input on sliders, you can achieve the desired functionality with some remapping and a slider from 0 to 1...

Permalink Reply by mark zirinsky on September 29, 2014 at 7:12am

a few ideas, apologize if these have been covered elsewhere.

1. a trim curves components. given the SDK discussion, perhaps this will be a collection of definitions.

2. an 'encyclopedia' of definitions, a la 'wolfram'. Initially this could be a 'reference' guide, but it might also be useful if these defs were available as an online resource where the defs could simple be pasted into what you are currently working on.

3. a graphical approach to culling and list sequencing; i.e., having a visual based editor to determine culling pattern, for example use a polygon of N faces, and graphical determine which faces become culling pattern

4. a way to use processor multithreading

5. a way to limit max time under grasshopper, i..e, stp and display calcs after, say, 1 minute, or 10 or 60 minutes, to see where you are.

6. and lastly, and more importantly, a way to stop everyone myself included from complaining about what a wonderful tool we have here. Thank you again David

Permalink Reply by Dimitar Baldzhiev on October 30, 2014 at 3:34pm

about number 4, you can do it right now with just a little bit of python scripting (you can call specific grasshopper components and multithread them) but at least to my experience and according to the profiler in 90% of the situations it takes longer to sync the results than to compute it on one core. This goes to the very essence of multithreading, some stuff makes sense to be multithreaded some do not. If you are still interested: http://goo.gl/T2SqsK

Permalink Reply by Frane Zilic on October 1, 2014 at 2:02pm

GH could ask for missing referenced rhino items when opening a file (maybe when opened too). Ideally each referencing component could have a customizable message. Like "Select the first curve to fillet" or whatever hint to explain what you are meant to do.

With this and the remote a user could easily open and use a GH definition.

If you add the ability to bake from the remote, GH could be used almost like a rhino command, only with the added benefit of having live control over the parameters.

If such a GH file could be executed from a button in Rhino, GH could even be invisible. It would ask for references, let you tweak the result form the remote and when you are ready press bake and the remote closes.

Permalink Reply by wout zweers on October 7, 2014 at 3:13pm

I would like to see 3d printing functionality.
What i want:
Scaling: detection of thin walls (they often fail when printed in a model)
Shrinkwrapping: to make an envelope around a(closed or almost closed)mesh
I already wrote a very primitive gcode generator but i would like to have something much better directly from rhino
In a gcode generator and slicer i would like to be able to define support, change it, since often support is not done very well.

Why i want it: many open source programs offer similar functionality but i would like to have this within grasshopper or rhino to work quicker and get a better stl file or gcode.

Permalink Reply by Philipp on October 30, 2014 at 2:25pm

Small wish from me.

1) Please, can the 'autosolving/manual solving' state be choosable before reading the file? Several times, I was making this common mistake connecting unflatterned wires to one block, freezing the whole computer. What is even worser, autosaver saved this mistake, so I had to start again from the previous version. It will be really cool if I could switch the file to manual solving before opening it (well, I see it as a switch in the grasshopper menu, either to read file's state or to override it with manual.

2) csv Parser - the real one, with quoteflags

3) snippers. Well, yeah, there are components, but sometimes it is just much more handy to have snippets option instead