This forum brings together some truly competent people, and food4Rhino offers many great plugins for Rhino and Grasshopper, but a question has been on my mind lately…
Is what we see on food4Rhino and this forum just a tip of the iceberg?
In your professional careers, have you come across companies with internal plugins that actually give them a competitive edge? I’m curious how sophisticated these solutions can be, or whether companies mostly rely on available free or paid tools and just support them with some Python or C# code. I work in architecture, but professionally I haven’t dealt much with other people using Rhino, mostly it’s me who is trying to use it instead of Dynamo to do things that Revit alone can’t do.
One thing against using proprietary tools is that there must be someone who maintains them, and other people who come and go in the workspace must know how to utilize them. In architecture, there’s a lot of cheap labor (interns, students, beginners) for whom standard tools and real-world projects can be overwhelming, let alone these in-house and exotic tools. I’m also curious about other industries; if you can write something without revealing any secrets, that’s great.
Absolutely. I can say myself from experience prior to McNeel and experience at McNeel. Companies, especially AEC, create some extremely cool and complex plugins, usually highly optimised for exactly what that company does every day, or that specific project. And as much as it might theoretically cost to maintain and create them, if it can save people time, effort, prevent mistakes and improve QA, it’s well worth building them.
In my experience(5 years in architecture in grasshopper) I came across only one useful plug-in (not a must have) that is not listed on Food4Rhino -pOd(not the button version, same Chinese developer). Also previously there was ShapeMap, it was not listed on food4rhino for a very long time, and available only on Chinese forums. Some big architecture studios use their own proprietary software, not even components. Some smaller ones use some c# components, but nothing too crazy. I think grasshopper for them in itself is powerful enough.
I’ve personally developed - as an independent developer based in Cape Town, of all places - a number of private tools in Rhino and Grasshopper for use by third-party companies all over the world; tools that aren’t publicly available on Food4Rhino or the Package Manager.
Given how powerful Rhino is as a 3D development platform, and how easy it is to get started with custom tool development (whether through Grasshopper, Python, C#, or C++), I’d expect there’s a huge world of bespoke, internal tools out there that never get mentioned in this forum.
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