Grasshopper: Waffle House v1.0
I took it upon myself this weekend to learn Grasshopper (formerly the explicit history tool), a new plugin from McNeel (Rhino).
All I can say is that the plugin is incredibly easy, and poised to change many things surrounding the field of architecture. It’s absolutely brilliant. While there are other products on the market that work in a very similar way (ie. Generative Components), none that I’m aware of are so simple or packaged with such a versatile and intuitive modeling package. Grasshopper plugs directly into Rhino and uses all familiar Rhino commands, so there is very little learning curve. Really, really, really simple and powerful plugin. Very exciting.
Since Sunday, I’ve been working on my first Grasshopper definition, which was inspired by a number of things, but primarily:
- The need to laser-cut things in a way that was not extremely tedious and annoying
- A Rhinoscript I was working on last year but never finished (but had less control)
- An earlier, and similar in function (but not in implementation) definition by Andrew Payne of LIFT Architects (and fellow Creative Commons user).
From here...
...to here in about 30 minutes.
(The blue tape is a result of a mistype for the material thickness…painter’s tape is not a structural material…)
Here’s the Definition (you can also find it in the experiments section:
And the Tutorial (apologies for the poor quality):
Waffle House v1.0 Tutorial from Benjamin G Callam on Vimeo.