Grasshopper Tutorial Beginner - Objects and Color System

hello guys welcome to this video in this one we are going to see the different kind of grasshopper objects and the color system it uses to represent a component state so let's go ahead and take a look at them basically grasshopper is made out of three things if you manage to keep this at mind you'll come to realize that grasshopper is actually a very simple software to understand these are the three main types of components we have in grasshopper the first one would be the parameters which you could think of them as the variables in a programming language these ones are used to store the different types of Bibles you can work with in grasshopper the next one would be the component which could be understood as functions meaning they perform different operations they are composed of a series of inputs which are computed to return an output and finally we have the connections which Indian ologies were making could be understood as the flow so the connections are the links between parameters and components and dictate the logic and relationships throughout the algorithm another important aspect of grasshopper is that you always work from a left-to-right logic which means that your parameters and components will always receive the information from the left side and return their outputs on the right side this will make that your algorithms or definitions always go to the right side of your canvas grasshopper also uses a color system to indicate the current state of a component for example components with a great color indicate that our component has array the information it needs to work and that we can work with it components also have the ability of being previewed or not on the Rhino viewport so when a component appears in a dark grey color it means that the geometry or data that it is contained inside that component is hidden and that it won't be showing on our viewport and whenever we select a component with our mouse this will always appear in a green color you can also enable or disable components in grasshopper a soft gray color indicates that our component is disabled so instead of just hiding the information from the viewport you actually switch up the component so we stop sending or receiving information the orange color is a default state of every component when you drag it into the canvas this color means that our component does not have anything references into it or that it's still missing something to be able to work and finally when you see a red color on a component it means that there is something wrong with it most of the times it means that one of the inputs is receiving it's not of the correct type so now let's go into Rhino to review all this information let's start with our parameter objects so I'm going to go to my parameters tab and then select one of the items that I have here and drag it into my viewport so now we have a word parameter inside our definition and as you can see these are very simple box which doesn't have any inputs or outputs indicators which means that it's only function is to store information which in this case would be points as this is a point parameter okay so next thing I'm going to do is to go to my surface tab and select a component for example this one that I have here okay so this is how a component looks like and as you can see is different from a parameter because it has a set of inputs on the left side and then an output in this case on the right side which means that this component will take a set of four points and then create a surface with them so what I'm going to do next is to create those four-point parameters and I can do this by simply copying this one so I'm just going to type ctrl C and then ctrl V to paste several copies of it and then what I'm going to do is to connect these four-point parameters into the four inputs that I have over here so what I have to do is to click on this node that we have over here and simply drag it into this node that I have in my component if you would like to unplug any of these parameters what you have to do is to place your mouse on top of the output you want to disconnect then press and hold the control key and you'll notice a red arrow with a negative sign then you just have to right click and drag the connection backwards so this will remove the connection so if you remember from my previous explanation about the color system all my parameters and component are in orange and this is because they don't have any information references into them so what I'm going to do now is to reference these parameters into some points and you'll notice how they change their color so I'm going to go ahead to my toolbar and select my point command and place some points into my viewport you and then to reference these geometries into my grasshopper definition what I have to do is to right-click in my parameter and then go to this option that says set one point and then simply select one of my four points so now as you can see this parameter has changed its color to gray which means that now it has a point references into it okay so I'm going to go ahead and do the same for the rest of my points you okay so there you go now as you can see a new surface has been created now that we have over four points connected to the inputs of this component so by now you may have realized the way in which grasshopper works we just start creating some relationship on your grasshopper canvas and then you start previewing them on your Rhino viewport so one of the main aspects of this software is that any change I make to my references geometries willing for my definition in real time and automatically updated so for example if I move this point my surface automatically updates according to the new position of it okay so now if I click on my surface component you'll notice that it will turn in a green color and the same thing will happen to the surface in my viewport so this is a useful feature in which you can track down which geometry corresponds to which parameter or component in your definition so for example if I click on my point parameters you see how those points are also being displayed in a green color okay so then to explain the left-to-right logic as you can see I always start my definition from the left side of my canvas and then as I start to grow my definition I will always go to the right so for example if I would like to divide this surface in point I could call for example a device reference component hmm so it would be this guy over here and then this component will ask me for a surface to divide so I would just plug the surface that I have here and then by default it creates a grid that goes ten points by ten points so now we can see these points displayed on our viewport okay so now let's say that I would like to move these points upwards in a C vector what I would do is to call a move component and I will put it to the right side of my divide surface component so as you can see this component is orange as it doesn't has any information references into it so the first thing is asking me is for the geometries that I want to move so I'm going to connect it to the points that I've just created and then it is asking me for a factor so in this case I'm going to call AC vector as that is the direction I want to move my points and here I could just add a nice lie control the distance in which I want to move my point so if I double-click on my slider pop-up window will appear where I can set up my minimum and maximum values so here I'm just going to set this one to nine and then I'm just going to press ok and then I'm going to simply plug it into my vector so now as you can see we can control dynamically the distance in which our points are moving so the next thing I could do is to create a set of lines that go from the first group of points that I had and then to the second ones that I have just created so what I would do here is to call a line component and then as you can see this component will ask me for two sets of points which would be the start points and end points of my lines so I would plug in my start points to the first surface points that I created and then I would plug my end points to the set of points that I have just moved so now as you can see a new set of lines has been created so in a general way this is how you start working in grasshopper you start from a very simple set of parameters and then you start associating components to start pulling up geometries and as you can see here this always happens from left to right logic so what I'm going to do here to show you what happens when you do something wrong in grasshopper is to connect this point input into into my surface just so you can see what happens here so now as you can see my component turned red and what this means is that this component has been fed with a type of data which doesn't correspond so whenever you have something wrong in your definition a component like this will appear and there are several reason why this may happen but this seems to be always one of the more recurrent ones okay so now let's say that I would like to hide this surface as I don't need to see it anymore what I could do here is to click on my surface component and then hit my spacebar and as you can see a new pop-up menu will appear and as you can see this menu has a lot of options but for example if we focus on these two little heads that we have here what I can do here is to enable or disable the preview of my geometries so for example if I disable it you'll notice that my surface will disappear from my billboard and this is very useful because as you go on your definition you may want to start hiding up certain geometries so things don't become too crowded or confusing so in this case if you want to bring back your surface you have to simply here again the spacebar and select the enable preview icon and then another thing you could do is to disable that component and you'll notice as soon as I do this all these components will turn orange as my surface component will stop transmitting information so I'm gonna hit again my spacebar and then I'm going to click on this disabled icon and you'll notice that my component turns in a different gray and these two components become orange as they have stopped receiving information from my surface component so if I want to enable it again I simply hit again my spacebar and select my enable icon and you'll notice my definition starts working again okay so finally if you would like to transform this surface into an actual Rhino geometry you can edit what you could do is something called baking which is when you convert your grasshopper visualization into actual Rhino geometry so to do this you simply hit again your space bar and this time select this icon that says big and then if I hide my preview surface component and go to my shaded view you'll notice that now we have a Rhino surface which we can use to edit it or treat it like any other normal Rhino surface and just to wrap things up our last thing would be how do you actually save your grasshopper definitions so the thing you want to understand here is that grasshopper saves its own files independent from the ones you create on rhyno and the way in which we do this is by simply going to our file tab over here and then select my saved document option so then a pop-up window will appear here so now I'm just going to go to my desktop and look for my exercise your one folder that I've just created here and then I'm just going to simply name my definition with whatever name I want so I'm just going to call it exercise one and as you can see our grasshopper files will have the extension dot gh so now as we can see here on our top bar our definition has already the name we use to save it so one thing I will recommend you for its definition is to always create a Rhino file with the set of initial parameters you have already referenced it so whenever you go back at it you always have a good starting point so what I'm going to do here is to also save my Rhino file into the same folder so I'm going to go to my file tab and then save as select my exercise hero 1 folder and I will save it with the exact same name so that's it now I have a RINO file and grasshopper definition created with the same name so whenever I go back to this definition I can always start working wherever I left my project okay so I think that will be all for this video and in the next one we're going to start seeing some concepts of what is data matching and lists which is the way in which grasshopper organizes information so thanks a lot for watching and see you in the next one

Channel: ThinkParametric

Views: 94,548

Rating: 4.9498348 out of 5

Keywords: Grasshoper, Rhino, Parametric, Tutorial, Architecture

Id: XHqiD-qXGA0

Length: 13min 52sec (832 seconds)

Published: Thu May 08 2014