Blender Grasshopper Live Link

I’d like to introduce newly developed plugin, Portal.

Portal enables data exchange via inter-process communication (IPC) between Grasshopper and external applications.

(The gh->blender render workflow is inspired by this post.)

Portal uses Named Pipe or Memory Mapped File to stream data directly through memory, which does not involve read / write operation on the disk, and thus can be more efficient. You can also stream data across local networks using Websockets or UDP for cross machine communication.

You can download here:

Feel free to try it out, contribute or suggesting features!

Cheers!

7 Likes

Hi @Sean_Zhang

Which versions of Rhino does this work with?
Which versions of Blender does this work with?
How do you install it and make it work?

It would be great if you could get a regular Rhino version of this working that doesn’t need Grasshopper. Is that possible? Or maybe better would be a live link between Rhino and Blender which Rhino users have requested and looks like you have working already using Grasshopper.

Thanks for making this available for Rhino users.
RM

Hi @3dsynergy,

I am working with:

  • Rhino 7 & 8 (Must be 7.13 or above)
  • Blender 4.2 (Lower version of blender should work, but is not tested.)

Installation

  1. Download the latest release from food4rhino - Portal.
  2. Unzip and copy the Portal.GH folder into ...\AppData\Roaming\Grasshopper\Libraries
  3. Unblock all library files:
    • Right-click on each .gha and .dll file
    • If there’s an “Unblock” option, make sure to select it
  4. Open grasshopper to use it.

Example scripts can be found in the latest release .zip file.

Regular Rhino plugin?

Currently the plugin only works in Grasshopper, I don’t have much experience developing regular rhino plugin, but this could be on the road map. I imagine it won’t be difficult since I already the core functions written.

I never thought about this, thanks again for the suggestion.

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Instead of unblocking after unzipping first unblock the ZIP file. When you then unzip any content is already unblocked. FYI.

3 Likes

Nice trick. Never knew you can do this😂!!!

Cheers!

1 Like