Rhinoscript vs Grasshopper

I have more experience with Grasshopper but have been starting to write Rhinoscript with the Monkey Editor and was just wondering what people thought of the two tools. Am I wasting my time trying to learn two different programs? My initial impressions are that Grasshopper provides a more manageable system with greater ability to quickly and fluidly test ideas and variations while Rhinoscripting is able to perform more operations compared to Grasshopper. But like i said, I'm an amateur with this. Any thoughts? Is it more valuable to learn how to write scripts in Grasshopper?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Luis Fraguada on February 18, 2010 at 8:37am

Being that GH logic derives from scripted logics, its quite valuable to learn to script as well. As a matter of fact, I would teach a bit of scripting BEFORE getting students into GH because a lot of times it just helps to think of organizing objects into lists/arrays.

In production and practice I use them both...while there is a lot of overlap, its really choosing the right tool for the job. Sometimes its Rhinoscript, sometimes its GH, sometimes its pen and paper, sometimes its xxx. And, as I heard Martin tamke say once, "Scripting is a timeless skill." While the time aspect of that statement is relative, I tend to agree with him. Many scripting languages employ similar logics, while GH is quite particular due to the way that the graphics abstract the underlying functions.

My $0.02.
Luis

Permalink Reply by Boyd Johnson on April 9, 2011 at 4:05am

Luis,

Great advice. Any tutorial (video preferred) recommendations for scripping? thanks, B

Permalink Reply by Cemal Koray Bingol on April 9, 2011 at 4:27am

In this case i'm in the same situation with BRC. There is not enough video tutorial based on RS if we compare it to processing or grasshopper. And yes, i would like to use that recommendations too.

thanks luis.

Permalink Reply by Chris Tietjen on April 9, 2011 at 6:50am

The activity that really helped me with learning Rhinoscript was following the Rhino pluggin newsgroup as well as the main Rhino newsgroup. In particular if you use a newsreader you can go back into the archive and look for posts that Mitch Heynick or Pascal Golay have contributed to. Both were and as far as I can tell still are quite willing and able to assist with scripting questions. Mitch in particular is quite a prolific scripter. There are others on the group that I am failing to mention that also contribute their scripting knowledge, the point being that there is a great resource there. Also using the example scripts in the the Monkey editor can be very instructive. Many useful scripts can be generated from these by making simple modifications. Reading a good VB scripting book is also helpful and in the end a handy reference. There's a wrapper for V4 Rhinoscript in V5 so it isn't necessary to learn Python to script in V5. Hope this helps.

Apologies in advance to Mitch and Pascal if I've misrepresented them in any way.

Chris

Permalink Reply by Giulio Piacentino on April 9, 2011 at 6:11am

I'm agreeing with Luis in full.

Also, if I'd be starting now and I had access to Rhino 5, I'd have a look at Rhino.Python. It's based on a scripting language that will run without changes on Rhino for Windows and Rhino for Mac. Python is also widespread in many industries.

- Giulio
_______________
giulio@mcneel.com
McNeel Europe

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