Pain Points in Grasshopper

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Jo Cook on May 26, 2014 at 1:13pm

Hi Peter Ive been trying to create a mero tesselation and was modelling it in rhino until i came accross this discussion and noticed you have made it in grasshopper. Do you have the script for this? Thanks so much.

Permalink Reply by peter fotiadis on May 26, 2014 at 2:32pm

Hi Joe

I'll post it here tomorrow.

best

Permalink Reply by Jo Cook on May 26, 2014 at 3:21pm

Thanks Peter

Permalink Reply by peter fotiadis on May 27, 2014 at 8:39am

Well.. one of my dogs got some sort of poison and I was unable to retrieve the real thing (no office until the dog is 100% OK). Until this happens get this (a very old version made in the dark ages kinda like a T-Rex).

BTW: The real thing:

(a) accepts different top-bottom nurbs controlled by a variety of ways including attractors etc etc.This is the reason that several components are not "minimized" (this def is a "bit" garrulous I confess, he he).

(b) has clash detection capabilities in order to avoid embarrassing moments when talking with these Germans.

(c) has images of nice looking girls (for inspiration purposes).

(d) has images of MERO cases.

(e) uses about 50% less components.

(f) exports (EXCEL) drilling axis for those Germans.

...

(z) can manage cladding support systems/corrugated sheets/etc without them... this def is 100% academic (see the unfortunate Roissy 2F and a myriad similar cases). Given the opportunity use Foamglas (1 "s") and avoid a myriad of issues.

BTW: this is a classic case about why we desperately need a decent block management at bake time: assume that you want to export something to your favorite AEC app (AECOSim, Revit, Allplan blah blah). By what means can you do it? (other than exporting a myriad of "individual/stand alone" balls/cones/tubes etc etc).

best, Peter

Attachments:

• Truss_including_MERO_on_NURBS-5-WIP.gh, 149 KB

Permalink Reply by Marco Traverso on May 18, 2014 at 7:44am

Since this is a semi-official thread for feature requests, I thought I'd post here some ideas regarding user interface and workflow enhancements - I'm pretty sure they do not apply to plugins, so if you think this is the wrong thread please feel free to turn it into a separate discussion thread.

1 - ability to set slider default grip style as 'Box and Text', as it
is much easier to grab the slider (it's larger than the round one)

2 - function that automatically reorders a group of
components on the canvas - at least gives a basic layout with a given
minimum distance among nodes.

3 - option to set up a snap grid on the canvas to easily move
the components around and keep things "clean"

4 - ability to set custom keyboard shortcuts for inserting
commonly used components or clusters - ideally it would be
great if we could freely assign a shortcut to any available
component

5 - Multiple remote control panels: RPC is really great to manage parameters within large Grasshopper files, and it would be useful to have additional panels that are activated when the user selects a given object within the Rhino viewport.

For instance there could be a RPC Grasshopper component with several inputs (sliders, toggles etc.) and a "trigger" input (a component that references a geometry that exists in Rhino and that activates the panel when selected).

6 - adjustable pointer sensitivity for component tooltips. When working with a pen tablet and large monitors, it is very difficult to maintain the pointer completely motionless: the pen is handheld floating above the tablet surface so there are micro oscillations - as a result it's very hard to have the tooltips displayed. It would be great if we could set a pointer "sensitivity" (in pixels or component size % )

Thanks for the attention!

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on May 18, 2014 at 2:28pm

1 and 2; agreed.

3) components do not have the same size, so it's unclear how they should snap a rectangular grid. Would it perhaps make more sense to have the component snap to vertical pixels whenever one of the input/output wires is exactly horizontal?

4) Not quite there, but you can assign aliases to components to speed up insertion via the double click popup box. So if you assign "pv" to the ParamViewer you could quickly create one using F4+pv. Is that sufficient?

5) That sounds like a really hard to discover feature for the user. It is possible to create several panels in an RCP layout, would it perhaps make sense to have buttons on the RCP that allow you to create a 'shortcut' to a specific panel? I.e., click the button labelled "Offset Options" and the RCP collapses all panels except the "Offset Options" one.

6) Have you tried setting the tooltip wiggle radius in the Preferences?

--

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Permalink Reply by Mateusz Zwierzycki on May 18, 2014 at 5:34pm

3, oh yes.

Permalink Reply by Marco Traverso on May 19, 2014 at 8:44am

Thanks for the quick reply David.

1) and 2); great :-)

3) Yes, it could be something like that: maybe a vertical snap grid that acts on the input/output dots, in conjunction with a horizontal snap grid that works on the left and/or right edge of the components, so that it's easier to align them (similarly to the align functions that show up when multiple objects are selected)

Overall, I think we'd just need a basic grid for alignment, so whatever is easy/quick to implement might be good enough.

4) great, I didn't know about aliases - that pretty much answers my question.

Related to this, when I press F4 and search for a component, if the mouse/pen pointer is above the list, when I press enter Grasshopper will insert the component under the pointer, and not the one I have found with the keyboard. Am I missing something? In case could it be fixed?

As a side note, at the moment the keyboard focus is always on the Rhino Command Line. Would it be possible to optionally change the focus when the Grasshopper window is active so that we can insert new components just by typing, without pressing F4 or doubleclicking? I just find myself constantly using the keyboard to insert components, so that'd be a very nice timesaving.

5) Your idea would be great to manage complex panels and I think would be very nice to have.

However I was thinking of a different workflow, that could be useful - for instance - when working with several objects in Rhino that are referenced in Grasshopper as basis to create more complex objects.

For example: I have three different surfaces that are used to create framed grille elements. It would make sense to select these surfaces in Rhino and access to a panel that shows the element properties (for example frame dimensions, type of grille, etc.) - similarly to the property panel in Rhino.

Additionally, If I need to create a new grille element from another Rhino surface, I could just duplicate the RPC component along with the definition without the need of manually publishing all the parameters to a new RPC group. I hope this makes sense.

I understand this may not be an "urgent" feature, however I find that working with RPCs is very pleasant so I'd really like to see this feature expanded in some way :-) 

6) Just perfect :-)

Thanks again David!

Marco

Permalink Reply by Ethan on May 20, 2014 at 4:30am

I often use the scale 1d command in rhino and then type in the desired length of an object, where as scale in gh can only be done by a factor... if its possible to scale to an exact length or thickness that would be great... 

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on May 20, 2014 at 6:26am

Hardly a pain point is it? Does this work for something other than lines as well?

I wasn't aware Scale1D allows you to set target lengths, how does this work exactly? 

--

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Permalink Reply by Ethan on May 20, 2014 at 6:38am

no I agree its hardly a pain point... sorry ... though about adding it to a separate thread but impulsively posted here... it works for lines as well as extrusions. you select the object to scale, select the origin point and then the first reference point ... then instead of selecting a second reference point you can type in a desired number and it scales to that exact length. I only learned of it recently as I always made a reference line of the desired length and snapped to that then deleted the reference line, but a classmate showed me this trick and I happen to have a case in gh where it would be useful... its almost scale nu but with a desired length instead of a factor. def not a pain point though I agree, feel free to delete the post to keep the thread on topic.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on May 20, 2014 at 6:57am

Ok, so basically it's a side-effect of being able to enter a number while picking a point and having the point end up exactly that number away from the previous pick point. It's not really a scale to length feature, but works like it if you're scaling lines and pick a direction that is (anti)parallel to the line tangent.

It would be fairly trivial to add a component which scales geometry to a specific length/area/volume. I can make it work on curves, surfaces, breps and meshes.

--

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

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