Lol, but before I do that, are there any projects I should look at that are doing this?
In other words, I’m a very efficient Solidworks user, but would rather build a system in the much-more-flexible-and-much-less-expensive Rhino/Grasshopper
You’ll need a constraint solver for this. Ideally something which is able to produce stable results from slight perturbations to the inputs. Several attempts have been made in this direction over the years (either as Rhino or as Grasshopper plugins) but none have been successful so far to my knowledge. Kangaroo is actually a pretty decent starting point for this, but the functionality it provides clearly needs to be wrapped up in easy to use functions.
In general the way Grasshopper defines data is somewhat counter to the way you’d do things in Solidworks, where you throw some shapes on the screen and afterwards define the relationships between them. It’s not impossible to approach thing that way in GH, but it is awkward.
To try and expand on this -
When you have constraints affecting multiple objects, and you want to be able to modify any one of those objects and have all the others update, while still respecting the constraints, the dependency needs to be multi-directional.
Grasshopper is mainly for 1-directional dependency graphs, without cycles.
Kangaroo can solve systems of constraints for quite a few of the sort of things you might do in Solidworks, but it can be tricky making a natural interface for this within Grasshopper, since you end up having to set up all the dependencies before one solver node in the graph.
Besides the fact that GH does not cover the majority of Rhino’s functionality, nor the Solidworks functionality. It would require tremendous effort to reimplement these, especially regarding Surface and Solid tools.
Interesting. Yes, constraint solver…
Ok, revision 0.1 of my opening statement:
I want to start building little bits of functionality that will make the Rhino/Grasshopper environment feel more natural to a native Solidworks user.
First vague idea is that might have something to do with one layer in Rhino per piece of geometry that I want to be ‘smart’ and link each of those layers with GH.
The time you need to achieve that is many orders of magnitude greater than the time you need to become comfortable using GH.
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