Wish: Console for controlling sliders

I recently saw that Houdini has consoles with a lot of sliders in it for controlling the geometry, and thought it would be a nice implementation for Grasshopper.

The way I imagine them, was if you could create instances (I don't know if instance is the correct word...) of the sliders already present in the definition. That way you could control the whole definition in the console, and because the original sliders would still be present in their location you would still be able to control or tweak the slider next to the component it operates on instead of having the sliders far away from their component.

Maybe this console could even include Boolean toggles.

By the way, isn't this how grasshopper work a long, long time ago...

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Ryan Gathmann on March 20, 2013 at 9:16pm

I have experiemented with something similar here:

http://www.ryangathmann.com/grasshopper-remote-controller/

The plus side is the controller is removed from grasshopper, so it can be designed to look like anything and work on any machine and just save a settings file. The down side is you can't control the existing sliders in the grasshopper script, you have to use new outputs. I might be able to change that though so they both match.

Does anyone else have a desire to see something else like this? I might be able to build a plugin an component that lets you have a remote control that communicates with the sliders in two directions. Ex. The sliders adjust the remote control, and the remote control adjusts the sliders.

Permalink Reply by Jesus Galvez on March 21, 2013 at 2:15am

Wouldn't that require redesigning Grasshopper's sliders and boolean toggles?

Permalink Reply by David Stasiuk on March 21, 2013 at 2:49am

Hi Jesus- Mateusz did some really cool work here: http://www.grasshopper3d.com/forum/topics/spaghetti-remote

Using his code as a starting point, it would totally be possible to build a component that identified all enabled sliders on the canvas and arrayed them as illustrated and dynamically adjusted their values as well.

Permalink Reply by Ryan Gathmann on March 21, 2013 at 8:10am

Galapagos also manipulates the sliders it attaches to. You could use a similar mechanic.

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