Working in Grasshopper

This course introduces Grasshopper, the parametric design platform for the 3-d modeling software Rhino. Grasshopper allows you to extend your modeling capabilities in Rhino and automate many of your repetitive workflows. It also provides a great entryway into computational design. With it’s intuitive visual interface, Grasshopper is much easier to pick up then scripting with traditional text-based programming languages. At the same time it is extremely powerful, and can even be extended with custom libraries for specific use cases.

The first session of the course covers basic Rhino skills including 2d drawing, 3d modeling, and visualization, as well as Grasshopper skills including working with different data types, exchanging geometry between Grasshopper and Rhino, and developing parametric models from a series of components.

The second session gives an overview of the main data types and structures used in Grasshopper. Participants will learn how to work with single items as well as lists of items and more complex data trees. They will also learn basic techniques for data management including filtering, sorting, grafting, flattening, splitting, and joining. A parametric facade is used as a case study to show how a complex computational model can be constructed using a variety of data types and a combination of mathematical and geometric operations.