Pain Points in Grasshopper

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Mateusz Zwierzycki on May 25, 2014 at 4:27am

You can use f4 key to search for components.

Permalink Reply by Jan Pernecky on May 20, 2014 at 5:53pm

hi, David.

I wish for these:

• Shift Path should be able to go all the way to the flattened list. 
  Because sometimes I have a list of items, sometimes it's only a single one. When it's single, then I need to make Pick&Choose between Flatten and Shift Path
• Path Mapper should accept inputs.
  Because sometimes I simply don't know the tree structure upfront.
• IndexOfTheLastListItem would save so much -1s!
• Touchscreen-friendly Grasshopper
• Simultaneous/collaborative editing of a definition over the internet (like Google Docs or Prezi)

and yet again - thanks!

Jan

Permalink Reply by Mateusz Zwierzycki on May 25, 2014 at 4:31am

• IndexOfTheLastListItem would save so much -1s!

1. Create list item component
2. Right click the L input
3. Toggle reverse
4. Profit

Permalink Reply by Armin Seltz on May 21, 2014 at 8:44am

Here are few things I have noticed. I am using Grasshopper for a few months now and have mastered vvvv and used Quartz composer a lot, so this is the 3rd node-based programming environment I have used.

So far I can't fault the functionality, so, being a UI/UX designer, they are mainly design/usability related.

In no particular order:

- grouping is so essential for large patches and is really cumbersome. Nesting groups borders on impossible, the blob grouping layout is misleading, no swatches to reuse colors. all in all its just not very userfriendly, even though its one of the very few means to structure and organize the patches. Wires going over groups and group labels are in the foreground, making them less usefull (see image), which brings me to my next point:

- there should be a way to dim or even recolor wires and or even nodes. The wires as they are just look a mess with slightly larger patches and make reading them and keeping them neat really hard. Transmitter/Receiver has its drawbacks but for those who know what they are doing its great and reduces mess a lot. In vvvv you can "hide" nodes and wires, which doesn't hide them completely, but just makes them very dim and transparent. Its so handy to hide all the small stuff, like a boolean at the "start" of the patch, but which controls many things in the patch, leaving long wires going across everything. At least let us have a setting to change color or opacity of the wires. I also like the different wire types in vvvv: curved, straight and right-angled.

Cheers,

Armin.

Attachments:

• group labels fail.JPG, 10 KB

Permalink Reply by Mateusz Zwierzycki on May 25, 2014 at 4:35am

You can set the wire style to "faint"... The only problem here is that you have to set it for each input separetely.

Permalink Reply by Andrew Haas on April 10, 2015 at 9:31am

I cant remember where I got this component from, but it converts all the wire types of selected components in the file at once.  Kudos to whoever wrote it.

Attachments:

• MassWireDisplayScript.gh, 7 KB

Permalink Reply by Frane Zilic on May 21, 2014 at 12:26pm

Wires 2.0

Being able to select and edit wires could improve the workflow and the readability of the definitions: 

- Select (multiple) and delete

- Select (multiple) and rewire. For instance when you have multiple I/O wires and just want to reroute some of them. The rewiring should detect which side of the wire you are on.

- Select and add a generic data component under the mouse pointer so that you can branch form there

- Select (multiple) and change line width. 0 would be hidden.  (tired of going through all the inputs of the wires I want to affect one by one)

- Select (multiple) and change colour and transparency (don't know why... but I guess it would be good for coding)

- Select and change curve. The current curve of the wires is nice but sometimes it's messy (in vertical arrangements particularly). Being able to set some control points and adjusting the I/O tangency could help getting a cleaner diagram

- Select and Define a linetype would get in the way of the current signification so I don't know if I would mess with that, but it's worth considering.

Not really wires but related: "extract parameter" could work with inputs and outputs and with multiple wires attached. 

Thanks

Permalink Reply by Victor Sardenberg on May 21, 2014 at 12:32pm

1 - Grouping texts and geometries to bake with LuchBox Bake component.

2 - Multi-Thread

3 - Name Coherence - mainly to teach ( f. ex.: why in Unit Z the input is Factor and in other vector components the input is Amplitude?)

4 - Sometimes you need to build a domain and sometimes deconstruct the domain (f. ex.: remap values and gradient)

5 - Components names - typing deconstruct 999 times a day is terrible.

Permalink Reply by Frans Magnusson on May 23, 2014 at 1:08am

Some things that would really improve the workflow at the office...

geometry pipeline functional within clusters

let all nick-named components (at least parameters) be searchable and let the user paste them onto the canvas with the inputs of the original component. (calling a variable)

along the same lines - search and replace (regex) manipulation of all nick-names

combined data+geometry group datatype

text input to pathmapper

tag datatype + output from tag components to arrange bulk baking in for instance lunchbox

and lastly the holy grail - native looping ability (maybe an interface between canvas and clusters?)

Cheers Frans

 

Permalink Reply by Steve Lewis on July 29, 2014 at 12:03am

What do you mean the geometry pipeline does not work in a cluster?

Permalink Reply by panhao on May 23, 2014 at 4:28am

Well I Wish the new Grasshopper have a good class structure.Easy to read and easy to override.It will be helpfull for us to develop more usefull component.By the way the C# using lines are locked in Script components witch brings a lot of trouble.

Permalink Reply by Andrew Kudless on May 24, 2014 at 6:26pm

I feel many of the comments so far have missed the intention of the original poster's request. Many of the responses have focused on core Gh functionality or UI improvements and this discussion has devolved into yet another wish list for Grasshopper. David already has enough on his plate so let's use this space to dream up things that other people can accomplish via plugins to make the Gh ecosystem even better. Marc, the original poster, works for Flux, a spin-off of Google X. If companies like this as well as all of the existing plugin developers are willing and able to contribute, let's make their life easier by providing some plugin ideas. Use other discussions for specific Gh wish lists.

So, here are a few ideas of my own (with potential plugin names):

Beaver: Basically a port of RhinoCam to Gh. RhinoCam is great but it seems like a no-brainier to have a parametric version in Gh. It would make life easier to be able to update the part and have all tool paths regenerate. Or be able to parametric ally see the effects of changing stopovers, tools, etc.

Condor: Google Earth importer. It would be great to have a plugin where the user could enter an physical address and a radius and have Gh import a digital elevation model, satellite image, street curves, and maybe even low-poly buildings that are with that radius centred at that addresses. I'm sure there are tons of legal issues with this and I know that plugins like Elk do something similar, but I feel the workflow could be improved.

Role Poly: universal unroll/unfold. There are various unroll era out there right now (fab tools, python code, kangaroo, etc), but none of them work really well and, in some ways, are not quite even up to the sophistication of even FormZ back in the mid-90's! Tons of work in the computation geometry has gone into mesh and surface unrolling/unfolding and it would be awesome to have that in Gh.

Mountain Goat: (OK, this on might be for David but only because this is a plugin focus area of his already). AFAIK, Galapagos and other optimisation plugins only work (or only work for me) for optimising for one "organism". I've run into situations where I want to use the same "gene" but apply the optimisation to many different things at the same time. For example, let's say I had 500 points that were all looking for their local optimum. Each would need their own slider or gene as their optimum could be different. Maybe Galapagos can already do this and I haven't figured it out.

I'm sure I'll think of more later. Thanks Marc for getting this going.

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