Grasshopper: is it procedural or parametric?

Grasshopper
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So I’ve been going back and forth about this for years with a few different long time Rhino users and though that I’d bring to the forums to hear some feedback from others in the community about what “we” consider the methodology used within Grasshopper to be closer to procedural or parametric modeling?

In the “traditional” CAD world parametric generally means some type of history tree which, in many ways, is pretty linear that I’d liking to be like dominos… knock one over and the rest fall. Now it’s definitely possible to have multiple branches within any given design but as a whole this is very visually represented in a linear history tree fashion.

In software like Houdini or Blender there is a procedural stacked way of doing things that can be, depending on how it’s used, can have non-destructive workflows, but usually can be created and then executed and then it’s gone. Though in Houdini it can be very much a nodal system…much like Grass Hopper to then drive complicated systems to exist.

Grasshopper I believe falls a bit more towards the parametric methodology side of things because the entire nodal system is always there. Maybe this seems trivial and in the end doesn’t matter but I’d like to think that much like how the direct modeling methods of Polysurface vs SubD are meant for, generally quite different uses and do require subtle differences in their approach that this delineation is the same thing.

Thoughts…!!!

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It depends how you use it.

You can utilise Galapagos and there is clearly no discussion that it is parametric.

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For me and being generic, paramertic is when you have variables (like inputs) and its change has a deterministic result. Procedural is when you have processes (like create a circle) and it is what you use to create or modify variables. So Grasshopper is parametric when you run it but procedural when you edit it.

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Algorithmic?

5

This!

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