Human is an add-on for Grasshopper that collects a number of useful utilities for extending Grasshopper’s ability to interface with Rhino. The name follows the Grasshopper/Rhino Ecosystem standard of naming plug-ins after animals. Because humans are animals too! Any similarity to my own name is entirely coincidental.

There are components for object creation, to make types like lights, hatches, and blocks not supported by Grashopper natively, and bake with custom attributes + user data; for object reference, loading objects (including text, hatches, blocks, and lights) dynamically by layer and retrieving their attributes; for advanced display, with lineweights and textures; for retrieving information about the Rhino document, like layers, hatch + line styles, materials, and viewports; and general utilities for working with the file system or manipulating data.

More Info:

• Grasshopper Group
• Food4Rhino Download Page

Human UI is a new interface paradigm for Grasshopper that enables the creation of professional-looking Grasshopper apps with custom user interfaces without needing to write any code. As of January 2016, Human UI is now an open source project. It was originally developed at NBBJ by the Design Computation Leadership Team over the course of about 10 months in 2015-2016.

Going well beyond the capabilities of the "remote control panel," Human UI makes it easier to create a user-facing display for your Grasshopper definition – one that looks and feels like a Windows app – so you can use GH to build tools for other designers or even clients, without exposing the Grasshopper interface at all.

Gone are the days of faking a user interface by laying out sliders and text panels and hiding wires on the Grasshopper canvas. Human UI interfaces are entirely separate from the Grasshopper canvas and leverage the power of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), a graphical subsystem for rendering user interfaces in the Windows environment.

In other words, Human UI makes your GH definition feel like a Windows app. Create tabbed views, dynamic sliders, pulldown menus, checkboxes, and even 3D viewports and web browsers that look great and make sense to anyone--including designers and clients with no understanding of Grasshopper.

More Info:

• Grasshopper Group
• Food4Rhino Download Page
• Bitbucket Repository

Metahopper is a tool for controlling Grasshopper - with Grasshopper.

The library contains a number of components and commands for querying and manipulating Grasshopper components dynamically. You can retrieve components and objects based on their type, their library, the group they're in, or by selecting them directly - or even get all the objects in a document at once. You can then retrieve information about these components + parameters, and the libraries they belong to. You can also manipulate objects directly: enabling/disabling, turning preview on and off, changing the color of groups, the text and size of scribbles, and the shape of sketch objects.

Metahopper also adds a number of functions and utilities to the menu bar, allowing you to automatically format groups of components according to recommended best practices, evaluate and quickly jump to the performance bottlenecks in your definition, and quickly annotate groups in the document for greater legibility.

Metahopper is designed for "hard core" Grasshopper users who want to be able to do magic in their definitions.

More Info:

• Grasshopper Group

Shutterbug is a plug-in for Grasshopper that enables you to drive Adobe Photoshop parametrically. Retrieve images and color values directly from open documents, send GH geometry to Photoshop as paths, set layer order and blend mode, load the Rhino viewport directly into Photoshop - the possibilities are endless.

Shutterbug offers an unprecedented degree of control over the production of graphics directly from Rhino/Grasshopper, bypassing the traditional export / open loop.

More Info:

• Grasshopper Group

Doodlebug allows Grasshopper to query and drive Adobe Illustrator.

Geometry from Grasshopper can be streamed directly to illustrator with full control over stroke, fill, and other appearance attributes. Geometry can also be retrieved from Illustrator, manipulated in Grasshopper, and then sent back for a full round-trip.

More Info:

• Grasshopper Group

I was the lead developer on Flux.io's "Leafcutter" project, a plug-in for Grasshopper that allows you to read from and write to Google Sheets.

Leafcutter exposes the following components:

• Google Authenticator. Creates a session token for connecting to your Google account.
• Spreadsheet List. Fetches a list of spreadsheets in your account.
• Read From Spreadsheet. Read specified cells from the specified sheet and worksheet.
• Write To Spreadsheet. Write to specified cells and worksheet.
• Create Spreadsheet. Self-explanatory.
• Find Cell Address. Query the spreadsheet for an existing value and return the cell address.

This project is open source and released under the MIT License.

More Info:

• Grasshopper Group
• Github Repository
• Food4Rhino Download Page

Pollination, the first-prize-winning project at the AEC Technology Hackathon in 2014, is an open source batch simulation and visualization tool for running Rhino, Grasshopper, and OpenStudio/EnergyPlus paramtrics. The simulations can run on a local windows instance or the "takeoff script" can be used to spin up an Amazon AWS cluster to run the simulations remotely and downloaded upon completion.

The tool has since been incorporated into Mostapha Roudsari's energy analysis plugin, "Honeybee."

Team:

• Nicholas Long
• Andrew Heumann
• Chris Mackey
• Matthew Dahlhausen
• Alex Swindler
• Mostapha Sadeghipour Roudsari
• Chien Si Harriman
• Nick Mattise

More Info:

• Github Repository
• Pollination for Honeybee

Leveraging version control software for graph-based languages and tools, such as Grasshopper and Dynamo, has been an elusive topic for far too long. Although there has always been significant interest, it has been a daunting problem to solve. Due to opaque binary file formats and messy XML documents, traditional VCS is of only marginal utility, and not worth the learning curve.

We believe one of the biggest roadblocks to the adoption of VCS overall, and by the AEC industry in particular, is the lack of a useful, simple UI for visualizing and exploring differences between two files. The ability to see the changes made to a graph, layed out with the original graph, is essential to properly understanding how the definition has changed and evolved as collaborators worked on it. We hope by exploring these issues, we can spur collaboration in the industry and beyond.

VVD ("Vivid") is a set of tools for working with version control software. It consists of 3 different tools, for computing diffs, visualizing them, and applying them to files. These tools are detailed further below, in the Usage section. They are best suited to a collaboration workflow where 2 or more team members are working on the same graph definition asynchronously, and need to merge their respective changes together as they synchronize and finish their respective tasks.

These tools are built using a combination of C# and IronPython, as well as the open Grasshopper and Dynamo C# SDKs, and the great graphviz tools. This tool was intially built at the TT AEC Technology Hackathon 2015, held in New York City.

Team:

• Owen Derby
• Dan Taeyoung
• Michael Kirschner
• Andrew Heumann

More Info:

• Github Repository