First, good sources of information:
http://wiki.bk.tudelft.nl/toi-pedia/Grasshopper
Meta-source:
https://explodebreps.wordpress.com/grasshopper-resources/
Book:
AAD_Algorithms-Aided Design by Fulvio Wirz
I am starting to use Grasshopper in anger now – and am managing to create things more quickly, and explore ideas that usually very hard, compared modelling by hand. I am taking a different approach to others who have been learning the software – I am looking at how it manipulates data and then thinking about how this could be applied, rather than approaching problems and trying to solve them directly. This is probably a reflection of my background as a more theoretically driven engineer, but I feel it has some real benefits in knowing how the program works, and is supposed to work, rather than developing bad habits and workarounds. I will need to move onto creating real items eventually though – though hopefully when I do I will be creating efficiently and working with the program, rather than against it.
There are several data primitives in grasshopper, which closely align to the geometric primitives found in Rhino3D – points, vectors, curves of various types, rectangular surfaces and their breps, fields. There are other primitives not seen in Rhino to control the flow of data: booleans, numbers, strings, colours, domains, matrices, file paths. Often, these are the properties of rhino primitive – the length of a curve expressed as a float for example.
There seem to be significant differences between working in Rhino and Grasshopper about ‘Modelling with Precision’ – in Grasshopper precision is guaranteed by the environment (or at least by the catastrophic results of making a mistake, errors usually become very apparent – usually…). In comparison, when modelling in Rhino discipline is required to keep a model working well and with good associative relationships, for example via the use of compound points and using the appropriate object snaps.
See pdf for examples of items listed below:
Working neatly in grasshopper:
Clustering: the most powerful way of working neatly, combines many components into one, this cluster can then be reused and saved as a cluster and used elsewhere.
Grouping – put a box round things
Aligning – make boxes line up nicely, not associative, which might be a mercy
Working with list data:
Lists from panels, type in data with a new line between each item, turn off ‘multiline data’ in the options (right click on the panel object).
Whilst lists of primitives are common (e.g. a range of numbers), the most common use of lists are lists of geometric primitives – for example, ‘set multiple lines’ in a line primitive will create a list of lines, this list of objects can then be manipulated as a list of normal primitives.
Many different ways to create, interrogate, manipulate lists. Some much more useful than others. See pdf for examples.
Next up, working with tree data structures.