Hi all! We are happy to announce that after years of development, Cyclops - a raytracing analysis tool by Foster + Partners - is now officially available to everyone. 
The development of Cyclops is driven by Foster + Partners’ commitment to sustainability. It is being released as a free plugin for Grasshopper to encourage widespread adoption and the integration of more sustainable design practices across the industry.
Realtime analysis
Cyclops speeds up raytracing based environmental analysis using NVIDIA GPUs, enabling real-time feedback for metrics such as radiation, sunlight hours, daylight and sky component.
Optimisation
Cyclops also offers a minimal update workflow using scenes where static data like geometries can be retained between analyses. This reduces computational overhead and together with the performance gains from running on the GPU, Cyclops becomes ideal for optimization workflows and iterative processes.
Scale
Cyclops is built to efficiently handle geometry and can run analysis on highly detailed models containing large amounts of data, such as those used in city-scale contexts. Since Cyclops primarily works with meshes, it efficiently processes dense and complex geometries while maintaining consistent analysis performance. Even with highly detailed models, the software ensures fast and reliable results without significant performance impact.
The plugin is developed by Foster + Partners’ Applied R+D Team, an integrated team of architects, engineers, data scientists and software developers. It is available for Rhino 7 & Rhino 8 via Package Manager/Food4Rhino with a 90 day update requirement (similar to Rhino WIP builds).
See below resources for more info:
Give it a go and let us know what you think!
For any related topics such as technical issues, bug reports, or feature requests, please use the cyclops tag and we’ll do our best to assist.
