Hi, my name is Enrico and i am a architecture student in Brazil, this year i’m learning how to use grasshopper for my graduation project and i do not know where i should start. I want to do some curve and organic shapes, and also i want to do prismatic shapes.
This is how i imagine my work and what i am trying to do. If someone could help me, i will be very gratefull. Thanks to all of your for the atention.
Grasshopper is akin to a programming language, requiring an understanding of syntax, components, structure, etc. Like when learning a programming language, its best to work your way up in terms of complexity with smaller projects before you tackle something large.
If you are completely unfamiliar with Grasshopper, I would start here: https://www.grasshopper3d.com/page/tutorials-1
Specifically with the videos by David Rutten. They do a great job introducing the basics.
If you finish the videos or are a bit more advanced, I would recommend trying to model something simple in Rhino first, then recreating it in Grasshopper as a parametric model while challenging yourself (how would I place these along a curve, how would I intersect these two sets of solids, how do I isolate items that are too large or too small). I would also try to learn the basic data types of Grasshopper, the AAD_Algorithms books are a good start.
Keep doing this until you can determine when Grasshopper would be the correct tool to use for a given project, because none of these projects used Grasshopper alone (or maybe at all). This is important, because once you can determine when Grasshopper would be useful in a given workflow, you can start rationalizing designs or installing plugins to expand Grasshopper’s utility.
To demonstrate this, I’m not sure what your site conditions are, the goals of the project, or the constraints of the design, and Grasshopper will never be able to tell me this. However I see some bridges and support diagrams with greenery, so if tasked with creating computational designs in Grasshopper, I would think to use the plugins Kangaroo with Karamba to simulate tensile systems and Ladybug to simulate sunlight exposure. The geometry could be anything (paneling, SubD, steel struts), and thus might be solvable with base Grasshopper - the key takeaway is that you need to determine when to use which tools, and that will require practice.
Learn surface modelling in Rhino or polygonal modelling in Blender first. Grasshopper is visual scripting language. Not a single picture shown requires GH at all. Its even more complicated to do it in Grasshopper. Its easier to automate it, if you understand the modelling process behind.
A lot of students simply download plugins and configure them for their use-case. This is an approach you can also take, but its learning curve is almost zero.
