Announcing Platypus!

Thornton Tomasetti’s CORE studio is pleased to announce Platypus, a new plugin for Grasshopper. We are releasing an Alpha build of Platypus today, for evaluation by the Grasshopper community.

Platypus allows Grasshopper authors to stream geometry to the web in real time. It works like a chatroom for parametric geometry, and allows for on-the-fly 3D model mashups in the web browser. Multiple [Grasshopper] authors can stream geometry into a shared 3D environment on the web – a Platypus Session – and multiple viewers can join that session on 3dplatyp.us to interact with the 3D model. Platypus can be used to present parametric 3D models to a remote audience, to quickly collaborate with other Grasshopper users, or both!

You can down load the Grasshopper plugin at food4rhino, and visit 3dplatyp.us to view your geometry on the web. This first round of Alpha testing will run for two weeks, until April 24 2014, after which the Grasshopper components will not solve.

We are very interested in hearing feedback from the community while the project is still in the prototyping stages of development. Please use the comments on this discussion to ask questions, suggest ideas, report bugs, etc. We are planning on rolling out another public alpha release or two this Spring, depending on how this first one goes, in advance of our Technology Symposium and Hackathon in New York.

Check out our getting started video below, and enjoy!

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Piotr on April 10, 2014 at 12:20pm

Hi Ben

It seems that I'm the first one to write a comments.

1. I love it, but it's pity that platypus, so far, support lines only. It would be great to have all sort of curves supported.

2. Another wish is to adjust browser's background color for better viewing (color picker or pre-selected colors, at least 5 shades of grey).

Permalink Reply by Ben Howes on April 10, 2014 at 2:54pm

Thanks Piotr! Excellent feedback.

We're hoping to be able to support Curves and Breps eventually, but for now we are leaving the meshing (and curve segmenting) up to the user in Grasshopper. I love the background color suggestion! Certainly doable...

Permalink Reply by Ben Howes on May 12, 2014 at 3:52pm

Piotr - we recently added control of the background color[s] to the View menu on 3dplatyp.us. My favorite color combo so far is tequila sunrise:

Permalink Reply by Claudio on April 10, 2014 at 7:44pm

Hello Ben. I love the idea, I'll be testing as a presentation tool, see how it goes

Keep up the good work

Permalink Reply by Rémy Maurcot on April 15, 2014 at 10:20am

Very good job,

For me nothing happens ...

Permalink Reply by Ben Howes on April 15, 2014 at 12:42pm

Hi Remy,

Very sorry to hear that nothing's happening for you. The setup in Grasshopper looks correct...

Try running it again, and press F12 once the 3dplatyp.us page loads in chrome. Do you get any errors in the console?

Permalink Reply by Jamie Farrell on April 17, 2014 at 2:32pm

I got a deprecated error.

DEPRECATED: .setClearColorHex() is being removed. Use .setClearColor() instead.

Permalink Reply by Ben Howes on April 18, 2014 at 12:27pm

That's a THREE.js warning - I'm interested to see if there are any errors about websockets connectivity for international users. There might be issues if users are going through a proxy server...

Permalink Reply by Dimitrios Papadopoulos on April 22, 2014 at 1:15pm

Hello Ben,

Incredible tool! Especially the join Session concept.

But same problem here.

Not running and getting the same error.

DEPRECATED: .setClearColorHex() is being removed. Use .setClearColor() instead.

All components and dlls unblocked, and running it from NY.

Do you see the models running through any website and not solely from the www.3dplatyp.us in the future?

Thanks a lot!

Dimitris

Attachments:

Platipus.jpg, 1.2 MB

Permalink Reply by Ben Howes on April 24, 2014 at 2:25pm

Thanks, Dimitrios,

I just published a new release on food4rhino that should throw an error when there is a connection issue on the GH side. If you give it a try, let me know if you get an error.

Permalink Reply by Dimitrios Papadopoulos on April 30, 2014 at 8:01am

Hello Ben,

There is indeed a connection error, which I am sure has to do with the IT restrictions of my office. I will try solve it with them.

Thanks a lot,

Dimitris

Permalink Reply by Florian ROCHEREAU on April 20, 2014 at 7:42pm