Hi Michael,
How feasible will it be or do you think it is possible to use grasshopper plugin with moi instead of rhino?
Moi seems to play nicer when it comes to exporting complicated sat files to revit's conceptual massing environment.
will be cool to eliminate a rhino>moi>revit wokflow.

just asking :)

cheers!

I am NO great fan of ViaCADs modelling but, the lower priced version of ViaCAD really does have some great attributes that can work well in combination with MoI.

Brian

Add my vote, though I guess this would really depend on the Grasshoper dev team porting it to Moi.
It would be great to have these tools in Moi.

Down the road I would also like to see a few simple Iteration tools in Moi, that retain parametric control.
Something like C4d's Mograph cloner.


@Brian: I think what the original poster is interested in is not so much CAD import options, but rather in getting a node based, parametric system working with moi.
Have a look at Grasshoper (google it), it is quite an interesting modeling paradigm.

Thaks Brian!
i'm not really looking for a program that works with moi just wanted to know if grasshopper could work with as a plugin for moi from a developers standpoint. This question is mainly meant for Michael or anyone that understands the inner workings of rhino, moi and grasshopper

Yup like Okapi said

Hi isaac,

> How feasible will it be or do you think it is possible
> to use grasshopper plugin with moi instead of rhino?

Not particularly feasible at all, I'm afraid.

It's just not generally possible to run a plug-in for one system on another one.

It's kind of like saying: "I would like to take the radiator out of this Ford truck and put it into this Honda sedan"...

A radiator is not something that is universal part, it depends on the structure of the car, how the different systems connect in to it, etc... so you can't take any radiator from any vehicle and put it into any other vehicle.

Plugins are much the same way, they are also built to fit within a specific environment, to use certain services and UI mechanisms offered by the host program.

MoI has its own kind of services and UI structures, but they are not identical to Rhino's so you cannot just take a Rhino plugin and run it inside of MoI.

- Michael

Ah! I see. I was hoping grasshopper did not have to be heavily modified
so maybe we( moi users) can bug them to give us a moi version.
Darn! Plans foiled heh! :)

in my opinion, grashopper is not easy to use. very far for moi future plan. for me, drivingdimension is better. michael said that he will improve history inside moi. lets see what michael art in the future. thanks.

Hi Anis, yes the problem I see with Grasshopper is that it is not really integrated into the main Rhino workflow at all.

It's kind of a duplication of every command in an alternative way to set things up.

That's quite a lot of stuff to duplicate...

Something for example where you could just model as normal and then have the option to see that sequence in a history list where you could alter parameters seems like it would be much more streamlined and easy to use since the setup would then just be the exact same thing as regular modeling operations rather than something completely different.

- Michael

Hi isaac,

> I was hoping grasshopper did not have to be heavily modified
> so maybe we( moi users) can bug them to give us a moi version.
> Darn! Plans foiled heh! :)

Well, even if it was feasible I don't think you would get very far in convincing them - grasshopper is not a 3rd party plug-in for Rhino, it is developed directly by McNeel.

- Michael

I think it really depends on what you are modeling. The point of parametric/ procedural modeling
is to make for a model which is really flexible when it comes to changes or revisions and also to acomplish repetitive modeling tasks that will be a nightmare to model the traditional way. After using houdini for a while I have come to really enjoy the node based workflow.
For things like product design etc history is great. But for other tasks like architectural design a parametric based approach is awesome

Hi isaac,

> and also to acomplish repetitive modeling tasks that will
> be a nightmare to model the traditional way.

For this part, it seems like being able to just do the repetitive task one time and then be able to go to some "history view" and see a record of what you just did and then possibly copy that to a Macro would be a much easier overall way.

Something more integrated like that would probably be more approachable for more people to make use of instead of having to go to a completely different workspace, find the same commands that you would want to use but in a different UI... It seems like just a generally higher learning curve when there is no integration.

From what I have seen, Houdini has more of an integrated approach similar to this, is that correct? Not like Grasshopper where the entire setup is completely disconnected from the command UI that you would use when doing normal modeling.

- Michael

>For this part, it seems like being able to just do the repetitive task one time and then be able to go to some "history view" and see a >record of what you just did and then possibly copy that to a Macro would be a much easier overall way.

Correct but what if that macro creates a pattern which you intended to copy to every point in an existing point cloud. ..Thats when the fun begins.

You are right! houdini's approach is way more integrated and has a lot more power. The only sad thing is houdini has limited nurbs/solids functionality.

Check out this video It shows the strength of true parametric/procedural modeling.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOLhnwllpgs

Please note i was not trying to request a change in the way moi's history works. It was just a question. seems it makes for quite an interesting discussion.

cheers!

LOL i did not realise GH was developed my mcneal and associates.

Hi isaac,

> Correct but what if that macro creates a pattern which
> you intended to copy to every point in an existing point
> cloud. ..Thats when the fun begins.

Yeah but that's also when it starts to become more of a "programming-ish" like tool, which certainly works well if you are able to think like a programmer but there are a lot of people that find that a foreign mindset.

Also don't get me wrong, Grasshopper looks like it has a cool UI, it's just that it behaves in general more as if it was a completely separate program in a parallel universe to Rhino rather than something that works like an extension of the regular program.

Maybe that can even be an advantage in some cases when you want to do a totally different approach, like something more like directly programming steps rather than modifying modeling workflow. But the negative aspect is that it means learning a much different UI than the regular modeling UI, and in the long run potentially having a lot of repeated stuff between these 2 parallel universes...

> Check out this video It shows the strength of true
> parametric/procedural modeling.
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOLhnwllpgs

Wow, that is an amazing result. At first I was just like "ok", but then when the tunnels and bridges pop in that is way cool.

Of course it probably took a considerable effort to get that all set up...

- Michael

Whoa, cool video!!! That caught me off guard too when the bridge and tunnel elements just sprang up like that...

As Michael said, the GH developer has basically coded a parallel version of Rhino commands and script functions. But Houdini was built as a nodal system from the ground up, where everything can be accessed by procedures. So GH functions do not go as deep as that yet. It may never reach that kind of depth... But this video is only showing procedural geometry and not using any special deformers or animation effects, so I think the entire project could be duplicated in GH. GH can also reference standard Rhino objects. So a curve could be used to define the road, then move the curve's points and GH will redraw all the geometry based on that curve. And then account for where the curve intersects the ground mesh, it's height relative to the ground, the length of spans for each elevated section, etc... It must be a tremendous amount of work using either GH or Houdini. I wonder really how much time was spent to set this up...

I've used GH to model a few parametric objects, and you almost have to forget what you know about modeling. Then start to think what is really happening within the program which allows you to model each element? How does an object get replicated along a curve and maintain orientation related to the curve? then you have to start dealing with planes, vectors, frames, domains, lists, etc... and the list seems never-ending. Even something simple like extruding an edge by a specified length requires a lot of steps to set up... It will give you a whole new respect for programmers and those GUI's which they create to do all the heavy lifting for you...

Generally speaking the time spent modeling something like that in video is pretty much the same as modeling it the traditional way(in houdini not grasshopper)
for some things you can actually do a lot faster than the traditional way.
It does require a different thought process and like Michael said it is practically "visual programming" which most people do not like. It takes getting used to.. I did not like that process as well when i started using hodini but have grown to like it a lot just wish it had better more nurbs surface operators...though it is actually possible to make those operators within hodini as well if you have the patience for it
GH is not gona get close to houdini for a long time. It is not as flexible and as integrated as Michael pointed out. For certain architectural concept modeling however it works great.

http://www.paraclouding.com/GEM/
GEM Another 3D toy ;)

Yup and so is bentley systems generative components. Been meaning to try out gem. just haven had the chance

http://www.braid.com/groboto-site/
Groboto is also some parametric! ;)

> It does require a different thought process and like Michael
> said it is practically "visual programming" which most people
> do not like.

Another possibility is that since a system like that is so similar to programming already that it could be good to actually emphasize that aspect even more so...

Some things are probably just easier and more compact overall when they are directly written as code instead of every single thing having to be a visual node with connector lines.

Things like loops, conditional statements, stuff like that can add up to a big soup of nodes and connectors while in text form them are just one line statements.

- Michael

Folks, just a note if anyone still reads this thread: you can now use Grasshopper with Rhino and Archicad and have your work seamlessly transferred from one application to the other via the (beta) Connection tool. You can test it here: https://www.graphisoft.com/rhino-grasshopper