Blocks in Grasshopper and manipulating them

Hello - I am an architecture student working with grasshopper. I have intermediate experience. My studio takes a unique approach to scripting in that we are encouraged to deliberatley misuse the program and create ‘accidents’ through the scripting by entering in existing building elements to see if we can find and uncover new relationships, ideas, forms that we would not usually arrive at if we intended it.

What this means is that I am required to put in building geometries like fences, windows, walls, roofs etc many of which are BLOCKS in Rhino. Unfortunately grasshopper does not enable BLOCKS to be entered unless using ELEFRONT or HUMAN (from what I’ve found online). When I use Elefront it seems that I cannot ‘break’ or edit the block in grasshopper through box morph, or flow etc which is what I really need it for. Is this at all possible? Can anyone suggest alternative pathways? Exploding the blocks in rhino is a bit of a counterproductive process to take.

Absolutely anything is possible using code (C# in my case). If you are familiar with the language notify for an indicative demo.

Hi Peter, unfortunately I’ve yet to breach that level yet. I have found that there is one work around using Human for Grasshopper. Instead of Blocks I could group the geometries in Rhino and then use the object attributes panel in Human to recognise this group. But i’m yet to get this to work properly. If you know how to get the Blocks into grasshopper where I can then ‘explode block’ to work with it in grasshopper that is also helpful.

That’s easily doable with code as well. In general: given any geometry define Instance Definitions (nested or not), preview and/or modify them (if required) and/or create variants and then place and/or replace them.

That said I never use any add-on (except K2) and thus I have no idea what is available out there and what it does.

Haha, C# Lord Darth Vader is back. Thanks to your comments I started scripting. Just started Python. Hope to get to C# end of the year!