¶ · Introduction
Hi, everyone! We're live. This is Nono Martínez Alonso, and I have here Andy Payne with me. We just played the podcast premiere for an episode that we actually recorded in September, 2022. I'm happy to have Andy here to connect the dots on what we talked back then, what's changed, and maybe we can talk about a few things that I think have definitely changed or evolved. Hey, it's Nono, and this is the Getting Simple Podcast. Hi, Andy.
Hey, Nono, how are you?
¶ · Grasshopper 2
I'm good. I kind of went through the episode to like create the chapters and see all the different topics and stuff. And one of the things that I personally enjoyed a lot was learning about some of the new things of Grasshopper 2 and what you've also added to Grasshopper 1. Maybe you can tell us a bit, something I didn't know about what's different between Grasshopper 1 and Grasshopper 2, why they're not merging so much in terms of just being an update of a software.
It's not like people can just start using the second version. And yeah, maybe let's start with that.
Sure. It's a good question. Although, like I said, my focus has mostly been on Grasshopper 1 development. So David Rutten is primarily in charge of the Grasshopper 2 development, which he started a number of years ago. And I think it was just a decision that he made, like I said, a couple of years ago, where he decided there were just certain limitations on how he built Grasshopper at the beginning that were preventing it from moving forward in a way that he wanted it to move forward.
One of those things being multi-threaded. So Grasshopper 2 is a ground up rewrite of Grasshopper. And what I mean by that is all the way down to the fundamental level of how the graph is created, how components get computed, things like that. And there were certain limitations on how it was structured at the beginning of Grasshopper 1 that were gonna prevent that. So a ground up was sort of needed to make it more performant and faster in certain cases.
And so I think he also wanted to explore newer ideas that maybe weren't gonna be available or compatible with Grasshopper 1 at the time. I think it was just a decision that he made that Grasshopper 1 was at a stable place that many people could use and are using in a lot of their projects. And so it was at a point where he could sort of stop development on Grasshopper 1 and sort of look at a new typology. And so I think that's where he started with that.
And then what I've been focused on the last, say, year or two in Grasshopper 1 has been adding these new data types that haven't necessarily existed in Grasshopper.
¶ · Data types
Grasshopper 1 has primarily been for geometry creation and manipulation. But now, and it hasn't really known anything about layers or blocks or hatches or line types, things like that, which exist in the Rhino environment, but not necessarily in Grasshopper.
One of the things that myself and a colleague, Kike, have been working on has been to expose a lot of these data types in Grasshopper so that you can actually create these new workflows for Grasshopper that can allow you to stay in the Grasshopper platform longer, right?
So instead of just using it for geometry creation and then you bake it and then you have to do all your documentation or whatever else in the Rhino environment, now you can actually construct all of these workflows directly in Grasshopper and even automate or parametrically create these workflows in the Grasshopper environment all the way through to the end, or at least that's the goal.
Yeah, I mean, that seems pretty cool. That seems like I personally would have enjoyed that a lot when I was in architecture school, because it seemed like there's always the end documentation process or things that you have to do that, once you bake stuff out of Grasshopper and then you lay out things and start working on it. It's kind of a pain to change a slider in Grasshopper, have everything recompute and not have that there. I really, really like it.
I've seen some of this stuff, and I'm looking forward to using, having basically excuses to use it a bit more.
¶ · Content Cache component
I was just going to add a note on that. One of the newest features that were added, which I think is really to Kike, because Kike was the main driver behind this particular component, but was the content cache component. If you're familiar with Grasshopper and baking, every time you bake, it bakes a new copy into the document. And so like you said, if you want to make a change, you then have to delete what you were working on and add a new one.
Well, with the content cache component, it's tracking the objects that you were actually updating, and will simply update the existing object instead of making a new copy of that object. And so the GUIDs stay the same, the object itself stays the same, it just updates with these new parameters. And so it really does simplify the whole workflow, I think, a lot and has a lot of potential.
Yeah, that's awesome. I guess also the fact of breaking a bit from Grasshopper 1 to Grasshopper 2 has given David a lot of freedom, right? To like, it's been rebuilt, it's multi-threaded, it's like everything's been reimagined in some way. So I guess like a lot of components, things that he probably was thinking that should work some other way, he's just doing it from scratch in 2.0 instead of trying to fix the other one.
Yeah, that's right. I mean, it's sort of, like I said, a ground up. And so he's written the whole graphics pipeline as much faster now. It really is, I think, a platform for him to explore these ideas that he's probably had for a while, but we're just constrained given the limitations of how Grasshopper 1 was necessarily set up at the time.
And so he's now able to write it in such a way with sort of a new modern approach that lets it explore the concepts that he's been really wanting to explore for a while.
¶ · Rhino Compute
Has anything changed in the kind of like Rhino compute or cloud billing model, what we talked back then? Or is it more or less like developing in the same direction?
Rhino compute is still being, is actively being developed. It took a while for us to actually get Rhino compute switched for Rhino 8, because Rhino 8 is now built on .NET Core. So we had to make some changes so that Rhino compute would work, whereas in Rhino 7 and earlier, it was .NET Framework. And so there was a little bit of development that had to happen in order to be compatible for Rhino 8. But it's still an active project.
I'd say it's still fairly in the same ballpark as where it was in general. We have updated the Hops component and the plugin development. But in general, there's not any dramatically new changes. One of the things we are looking at adding, since I talked about these new features in Grasshopper 1, one of the things that we added is the ability to store attributes of an object, right?
¶ · Object attributes
So before, a curve only knew that it was a curve, but it didn't know anything about the layer it was on or the line type that it was assigned to, and so on and so forth. Now, we have these things called model objects that you can bring in that essentially is the curve, has the curve geometry, but it also has all those attributes that knows what layer it's on. And every attribute, if you look at the object properties panel that is available there, is now available in Grasshopper.
So one of the things we need to do still that we've worked on, but has not been released, but probably will soon, is the ability to pass those model objects through Rhino Compute. Because right now it's really still geometry driven, but we will then be able to pass through objects that have those attributes stored and will allow you to use those objects in any definition that you would normally, but use those through Rhino Compute.
¶ · New features
Okay, and so there were on the chat, you mentioned also a few things, the figurines feature and the shout feature from Grasshopper 2 that you're not directly working on, but can you maybe share that to capture that a bit also as well?
¶ · Shouts
Sure, I mean, like I said, there's a lot of really interesting features that David has unveiled that, I'm not the expert or the pro to necessarily say, these are the features that, but some of the things that have caught my eye is this ability, there's a component called a shout, which lets you set a variable and some value, but then you can listen to that shout anywhere else within your document. But the interesting thing for me is that you can actually shout from other documents.
So you can have a shout from file A, and then you're opening file B, and you wanna listen to a shout from file A, but you're in file B, if that makes sense. And then you can actually, he has a visualization of where the values are coming from. So you can actually see it's coming from this file, which is then linked to this file and so on and so forth. So there's some really interesting things that he's been doing there.
¶ · Visual diffing and graphics
He's very briefly started working on visual diffing. So document history kind of is an interesting concept that I know a lot of people have asked about in Grasshopper 1, but he started to explore that idea of how can you compare a previous version to a new version? What's changed? What is the metadata attached to those objects that change? Things like that. And then of course, let's see, what else did, some of the graphics that he's been experimenting with.
¶ · Figurines
Like I said, there's some really interesting figurines. Beyond just, I think he has cars. I don't know if trees are available yet, but I think it's been talked about trees, cars and people. But the interesting thing is this concept of a pen. A pen is this thing that you can attach to any number of objects that will modify all of the objects that you've attached it to. And so for example, you can have a pen that changes the season of something.
And so if you change the season of the figurines, they change the clothes that they're wearing from spring to winter, or summer to winter. They'll have less clothes on. Or autumn, they'll be carrying umbrellas and things like that. You can also have pens that modify the style, the graphic style, whether you want it to be flat or rendered or of a specific color.
So there's some really interesting things I think there that are new concepts that just didn't exist in Grasshopper 1, but I think have a lot of potential.
Yeah, that's pretty awesome. I look forward to trying. And where is this available? So Grasshopper 2, is it available?
¶ · Installing Grasshopper 2
Grasshopper 2 is available in the Package Manager. It's a plugin, so it's not built in to Rhino the way Grasshopper 1 is. You have to install it with the Package Manager. So if you're in Rhino, you would just launch the Package Manager, type in the Package Manager in the command line, and then you would search for Grasshopper 2 or G2 is sometimes how it's referred to.
You may have to click on the checkbox at the bottom of the Package Manager that says include pre-releases because it's still sort of an alpha level of development. But once you click on that checkbox, it should show up in the Package Manager and you can install it. And then you launch it using, I think it's the G2 command. So just type G2 and it will launch Grasshopper 2. And then you can explore it the way you would Grasshopper 1.
Also available in Rhino for Mac?
Yes.
Gonna try that. Gonna try that today or tomorrow.
Yeah.
So we talked a bit about Grasshopper and Rhino. Before I let you go, what's changed for you?
¶ · Andy's day-to-day
I mean, seems like more or less the same, or are you kind of like...
Well, things are good. Family is still good. We're still enjoying everything around us. Our lifestyle is good. So I can't complain there. The job is good. I'm still staying curious and enjoy the work that I do every day, and getting to interact with clients and customers is a real benefit. So honestly, I have no complaints as to what I'm doing. And yeah, so I think things are still pretty much the same part for the course. So I'm just enjoying life as it is.
I saw you in Barcelona, I think it was last year, right?
Yeah, probably last year. That's right.
Have you been traveling a lot? Have you been doing a lot of workshops?
Not so much. We did a trip to London. There was a conference in London, and then another conference in Barcelona. And then we did Autodesk University in the fall in Las Vegas. So a couple of conferences here and there. But overall, travel schedule is fairly minimal.
¶ · 3D tools
And I'm curious, is there any other tool, like startup or any other competitor product? Is there anything that you're paying attention to? Anything that calls your attention that seems like they're doing cool stuff?
So sure, there are some interesting implicit modeling software that I think is intriguing. There's one called Metafold, I believe, out of Canada. And nTopology are kind of interesting. Those are sort of in the line of Monolith and what it was doing 10 years ago. But they're taking it in these new directions. So I kind of am watching those. There's obviously a new modeling package called Plasticity, which is interesting. I don't know a ton about it.
I've dabbled in it and watched a couple of videos, but it's a new modeling kernel and a modeling platform. So it'll be interesting to watch where that goes. And of course, Blender and how it works. So those are sort of on the horizon of things that I'm just kind of watching and keeping up with. Thank you for the invitation.