Viewports in grasshopper?

Hi,

when working with large definitions, it frequently happens that you have to connect components that are very distant from each other. Usually one would just drag things closer momentarily, do the connections and put things back in place. This works well when you know exactly what connections are necessary. However when you are in the process of finding out how to make things work, in my experience this ends up with everything completely cluttered up, with several experiments or test in the same place.

One solution could be to have grasshopper support multiple viewports, though I know it would have it's drawbacks. For example, I think that for it to work well, you would have to change the drag and drop connection style for a click once (or double click...) and click again style, which has the disadvantage that it's slower and, well I think everyone likes the drag and drop :)

Another drawback would be that for those who work on one monitor, it would be like having gameboy sized viewports, so it would be next to useless.

On the other side another benefit would be added if you could have the viewports span more than one definition, for example having a viewport in your "toolbox" and another one in the definition your creating.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Danny Boyes on May 2, 2013 at 9:34am

Hi Jesus,

I didn't know connecting remained when cutting/pasting.

I just remembered something else: If you have a definition that you are sharing with someone else and both of you make additions in different versions, provided that the components that you connected to have not changed i.e. been deleted and replaced then anything you copy downstream components and paste back into the original which will have the wires hooked up automatically.

Open the three examples below and copy anything extra in the working files and paste them into the original file and you will see what I mean. NB the Upstream components the Sphere and the Brep Param will not.*

EDIT* this is due to the wire information being held in the downstream component only. That is why you cannot change wire display from outputs

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Permalink Reply by phillip on May 2, 2013 at 4:53am

Hi Danny,

thanks!

Indeed I wasn´t aware of ctrl+shift+v is placing objects in the middle of the view.

Still I belive in somthing like a dock for GH 2.0. Another Idea was to use it to state public values, which could be used across definitions. Thats why I also refered to the Tabs discussion earlier.

As said before "many levels of discoveries..."

Nice to have you back.

Permalink Reply by Jesus Galvez on May 2, 2013 at 4:55am