Hello World - Basic Introduction to Grasshopper

hey class this is a professor sense key I'm gonna talk to you today about doing you a simple hello world program in grasshopper and you're going to want to start by either downloading grasshopper from the link that I provided to you on Moodle or using a school computer and it's already installed on there okay so you're gonna need to be on the window side in any case and you start by opening up rhinoceros and then in order to get grasshopper opened once it's been installed you're just going to type in grasshopper in the command window and it can open up grasshopper so what I want you to do is just create a simple kind of parametric column and the way to do that is to start by making a simple cylinder and cylinder is available under service under the freeform I'm sorry under the primitive window you can go to cylinder here that'll let you drop a cylinder otherwise you can double click in the window and grasshopper and you can search for it start typing in cylinder CY and then you can put a cylinder in okay either way it is fine I prefer to search just makes it easier I don't always know where things are here you can see that the when you made the cylinder component it made a basic cylinder and the cylinder has various parameters various kinds of input that it wants you can generate it on a plane so it wants a plane object really that I've it on the default setting for now the XY plane at 0 0 it has a radius which is a number and right now it's 0.5 in our system units so depending on how you set up your units that could be a foot in diameter or it could be an inch in diameter so be kind of careful with that and then the height so what we have is a plane a number for radius and a number for height and what we're going to be working with are basically these two numbers here those are the parameters that were interested in now to change a parameter you can right-click a number and you can go to set number and you can type in manually what you want that number to be so if I want the radius to be one foot let's say I can type in 1 and that's going to change it the problem of that is though it's not really a parametric I can't really vary it I mean I could certainly change it but it's fixed okay I can judge any parameter I can I could say set number and I can put that in there instead what I'm going to do is I'm going to put in a number slider and a number slider is going to allow me to vary a parameter in an interactive way so I go to parameters special and I'm actually doing like a mouse click on this box here to open this up I go to a number slider you can put one in otherwise I can type in you know number slider same same thing okay so I can connect the number slider to a parameter and that's going to allow me to vary it in like an interactive way so you put the mouse on the side hold the mouse button down it's going to allow you to make a connection and you're going to put it it's going to turn into a solid line when you have it plugged into one of these input parameters and then you let go and give me a connection so I can save of a ferry I can go from one all the way down to nothing and that's going to change my radius okay now if I want to change that slider if I want to change the parameter controls I right-click it I go to edit I can change the name of it so I might what I actually call it radius it's like meeting a variable I can change the rounding precision of it change the number of digits so they have no digits whole numbers only I can make it you know tenths hundredths things like that if I double click maximum I can set it so that the rainy the maximum radius might be let's say three feet and I can set a minimum radius so I can say point 1 feet for the minimum so it's going to be arranged and then the range of that is 2.9 I could also type in something to the range and I would get a different range as well I can set the value here if I want to but I can also set it when I use the the object so this is basically how you create a custom slider or how you how you make the slider customized so now I have a radius slider goes all the way to 3 okay and now I can do interesting things with these with these sliders that can create different parametric relationships I can connect take a another connection from this plug it into the height and now the height varies the same as the radius so it almost kind of scales okay the two variables are dependent upon one another okay the maximum is three minimum is is this point one okay you could also make a copy of this slider and connect it to the other parameter and then I again I can change its value so I can separate it maybe I say the height can be as much as fifteen and then if I change that so the height goes to fifteen the radius can be another parameter so I three different parameters in fact they're probably want to rename this you can rename it by right-clicking and changing the title here so now it's height okay if you want to organize this a bit you can you can pick them of the window and then you can use these to align them so I get them nice and straight if you put your mouse on the side of it you can actually stretch it a good you want to play with that it can still align these if I want to okay so I have a basic cylinder it's got two parameters radius and height then one last thing I can actually use math to create a relationship between the two parameters so I can create a proportionate relationship so if I delete actually let me disconnect this one so if I right click here I can just connect it so now it's here what's I connected I can connect this to the radius now it's really big if I right click radius R go to the expression editor I can type in an expression and the variables are and I get they are divided by ten and so now my the height controls the rate is always the same proportion okay so it's always one-tenth of the height I can do other things too I get changes and I could say it's always going to be C it's always going to be R minus two it's a simple kind of math that you guys want to do so now the race is 13 radius is getting closer to point five nine so over Thursday this kind of thing is all I want you to do I just want you to install a grasshopper on your computer if you're using a computer or go to the labs and figure out you know how to start grasshopper and just make a simple parametric column and trying some of the things that I showed you that's really just the most basic thing that I could that I can teach you right now and so if you do that you'll be ready for what we need to do in a lab so just get comfortable with the interface get comfortable with using you know Rhino to navigate the window if you're if you're new to Rhino it assumes and pans and things like that know where things are in the in the grass operator phys and you know in when you already grasshopper I didn't mention this but to a pan use the right mouse button and to zoom use the zoom wheel and that's pretty much what you need to know there and just get comfortable with this stuff and then bring questions with you to a lab on Thursday and again nothing just a bit with this I just want you to to experiment with this and I'll see you all on Thursday thank

Channel: Nick Senske

Views: 73,406

Rating: 4.9137254 out of 5

Keywords: UNCC, Grasshopper, Rhino, ComputationalMethodsF11

Id: A9OdZKsSIq8

Length: 8min 20sec (500 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 25 2011