I'm currently rendering a video made using Chronolapse while I toyed around with Grasshopper. Shortly into the video, I decided to give myself something to try to achieve by the end of it - a twisted rectangular prism shape with rectangles along it representing floors. Looking back over it and playing a little more with Grasshopper, I noticed there are a few tools I could possibly have used to make the final form much faster.
However, the main point of this stage of my computer modelling experiment is to get myself familiar with Grasshopper, rather than efficiently producing an end result in one go. As with any experiment, the criterion of success is what is learnt.
The main sticking point was when it came to combining two lists of transforms - one list of rotations, one list of translations - so that I'd get one list of transforms that each represented a rotation and translation. I found out how to combine an entire list of transforms into a single transform, but that was the closest I could get. So, in a bit of desperation and having never before programmed in VB.NET, I fiddled wildly with it in a script until I got my head around how Grasshopper let you handle its parameters and "output" - which is really just any variables passed by reference rather than by value.
The next sticking point was that I couldn't find an object reference that would drastically speed up the rate at which I could throw together the script. I noticed the IDE had an autocomplete list that would pop up as you wrote your script, but it wasn't really comprehensive enough for me to know what each variable or method in the list was for. After Googling for a while and finding nothing, I resorted to looking in the plugin folder for Grasshopper, and found RhinoCommon.xml under Plug-ins/Grasshopper/rh_common/RhinoCommon.xml (relative to the Rhino install folder). You'll probably see a few flashes of it opened in Chrome in the video once I upload it. It was somewhat helpful because I could easily Ctrl+F and enter the name of the type I wanted, and hit Ctrl+G until I found it. Admittedly, that took quite a few Ctrl+Gs at times, but on the way, I was finding a few useful tidbits here and there.
After I got past that point - and a few sundry errors to do with invalid typecasting of Transform to Vector3 - it was fairly smooth sailing.
I intend for my next experiment in Grasshopper will involve generating a form that's a little more complex, but I'm not quite sure what would be appropriate yet.
I'll put the Chronolapse video up in my next post when it finishes rendering.
No comments:
Post a Comment