Simplex Noise Field

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Comment by Thomas Helzle on April 25, 2015 at 4:15pm

I see. Well, I currently have a lot of complete freezes where I can't stop the solution. Sometimes because I do something wrong and the solution becomes too complex, but often it's just a slightly more complex Loft or a SurfaceMorph. Would be great to not wait for minutes each time a parameter is changed (That's why I mentioned the sliders, they go into some kind of frenzy-stupor when touched, where the drag-pointer flickers like crazy for a while, even when I just try to enter values. I now use static values instead...).

I worked with Softimage XSIs ICE-Node-System a lot and the one thing they got right was multithreading and keeping things interactive. The GUI pretty much always stayed interactive, even when the solution did some heavy grinding ;-)

Anyway, I'm really happy I finally found Grasshopper and look forward to the further development!

Cheers,

Tom

Comment by David Rutten on April 25, 2015 at 2:56pm

@Tom, background solution is certainly a way to multi-thread solutions, but it's not the one I'm gunning for. The two main goals I've set for MT in the next version is just general speed-up, and the ability to more reliably cancel a running solution. I suppose once all the plumbing is in place it would not be too difficult to have solutions run in the background, as it just becomes a matter of thread management, but -certainly initially- that is not the point of MT.

Comment by Thomas Helzle on April 25, 2015 at 12:10pm

I currently learn Grasshopper with the Rhino Demo and am totally blown away. I've worked with all kinds of node systems (2D, 3D, Audio) for many years, but Grasshopper is the most beautiful and well executed one I've ever seen!

I stumbled upon this topic since GH2 and Performance Improvements are mentioned (besides being a sucker for procedural noises of all kinds). :-)

I think one major improvement could be to have the updates run in the background, so that I can continue working while a slower process is calculated. In Digital Fusion each node shows a progress bar if it's slower than a certain threshold, but you are still able to add and move nodes while GH seems to more or less freeze while it's updating (sorry if this is what is meant with multi-threading).

It could also be cool to have an option for sliders so they only update when I let go of the mouse.

Sorry if my newcomer-enthusiasm takes the better of me here and I'm missing something obvious ;-)

Thanks a ton for an awesome tool!

Cheers,

Tom

Comment by Alexander Świątek on April 25, 2015 at 11:18am

Vector as a geometry option would be cool

Comment by David Rutten on April 25, 2015 at 10:24am

GH is a complete rewrite, so it's taking a long time. I'm still working on fundamental core classes at the moment, and I've been doing equations and fields for the past two weeks. These are both types I'd like to put front and central in GH2, ideally replacing number and vector inputs whenever possible.

Major areas of focus for GH2 are (in no particular order and not an exhaustive list):

• Performance. (Both multi-threading and just getting stuff to be faster)
• Better SDK. (Adhere to .NET guidelines, more consistent, better organised)
• Cross platform. (Make it run on both Windows and Mac)
• Improve GH as an IDE. (Provide better debugging and analysis features, as well as providing better ways to structure and document *.gh files)
• Plug-in manager. (Make it easy to install and uninstall the plugins needed to open specific files. Make it easy to find plugins that do stuff you need. Make it easy to know for sure a plugin that does what you need doesn't exist)

Comment by Alexander Świątek on April 25, 2015 at 9:49am

wow wow wait a second Grasshopper 2 is coming? :DDD What changes/improvments are planned for GH2? I missing a serious stuff here :D