Help in Grashopper

Hi,
I’m trying to make my first steps in grashopper.
My experience with the help is quite bad as the components are not explained.
A Brep for example “contains a collection of Boundary represantions”. That doesn’t mean anything to me.
In rhino there are much better help files even for the real self explaining commands.
It becomes clear which options there are and which will not work.
Here in Grashopper many components will not work together, often a step in between is necessary. But at least I can’t really get the system behind it.
A line in GH cannot be referenced to a line in rhino, ok.
If I draw points in rhino and reference them, the line will be shown. But changing the points doesn’t change the line. Probably I should reference the points to point objects in GH and define the line then.
But again, in rhino the help is much more accurate and detailed.
Where it should be the other way around with an abstract working software.

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See this: http://grasshopperprimer.com/en/index.html?index.html

BTW: Rhino is made/supported by many whilst GH is made by a certain David (and propably with few/some assistants). Meaning that in certain aspects … indeed GH is spartan. But this and the old (alas dead) old - far better looking - Forum are great resources for a vast variety of things.

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Yes, but this is a special case. Use a Curve component to reference a line, then it will work. I think this is the only(?) case in which a named reference doesn’t seem to match the expectations based on the equivalent in Rhino.

“Brep” is a slightly more “complex object” than a point for example. A box would have not only corner points, but edges and surfaces and… such a “compound” will typically be called a “Boundary represantion”. In short, an abstract way of saying that the object is a little bit more complex, but it has boundaries (a point has not) etc, etc. Be prepared to look out for abstractions in Grasshopper. Abstract components is the only way though to make a reasonable amount of basic geometry and functionality which will basically solve ANY thinkable problem (which is the very point with raising the level of abstraction).

As I just explained, GH is abstract, and it should be. But the primer will help you get started. It’s about getting used to think on that higher level of abstraction, then the GH components starts to make sense… :wink:

// Rolf

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Brep is something you should know as a modeler. It is not exclusive to Grasshopper: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_representation

@RIL: Thank you, that’s been helpful.

This were just examples, I wasn’t asking about the explanation of a Brep or anything.

If Grashopper is developed only one man and a few helpers sometimes, ok.
But as it is massively promoted now, lots of people new to Rhino at all (but probably used to other parametric software) will try also Grashopper.
To let them try with this rudimentary Help is just not clever.
McNeel should invest there very soon.

Also most Grashopper tutorials focus on artistic design, as this gives impressive sights of what is possible.
The engineering side with by parametric coordinates fixed points, vectors, … comes to short from my point of view.
The information is for sure in tutorials available, but can one oversee where to find the right one?
The number of them is so massive and they are spreaded all over different sites.
A register with search functions would be great here or centralized storage.

I totally agree with you. Much to my surprise, as well. But after you meet the people in the forum, you’ll understand that most of them are Architects, second most Graphical Designers, and after that amongs all others are the engineers. I guess David simply focused on the logical audience in his help documentation. And I don’t blame him. Most engineering companies I know use Rhino for two things: Post-modeling (cutting, trimming…) and for file conversion, as to my knowledge Rhino has the widest range of supported formats.

I don’t blame David also. He’s done a real great job.
It’s just about manpower that’s been missing here.

At least there are a lot of marine designers and (counting the number of special marine plugins) also marine engineers.
I personally use the design models I get and create buildable ships out of them.
There are plugins for marine structure, hydrostatics, piping, structural strength calculation and many more.
I think that just underlines the need for better help files, also from the engineering point of view.
For example how to place an item in relation to the ships base point.
Everything I have seen places just wildly around somewhere.

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