Hello,
I’ve been using Rhino 5 for five years now, and I now mainly use it for grasshopper and sometimes some massing. Is Rhino 6 an important tool for grasshopper in the future - will Rhino 5 be phased out of grasshopper compatibility?
Thanks
If you work with anyone else, the incompatibilities between R5 and R6 will make that impossible. Trivial changes to math components are only the tip of the iceberg. It’s a one-way street, there is no going back. Once you touch an R5 file with R6 and use any of the new components, that’s it. It will never work again in R5. Running both R5 and R6 on the same machine appears to be fraught with head banging obstacles.
Some of the more noticeable features in R6 are related to rendering, which may or may not be important to you? If it is, R6 is definitely cool.
P.S.
R5 wasn’t phased out, it was wantonly abandoned, obsolete by design, most likely killed deliberately to force everyone to upgrade.
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Grasshopper for Rhino V5 will not be developed any more, but it will continue to run in V5, as V5 itself will. GH development continues with GH 1.0 for Rhino 6 - in parallel with GH 2 at some future date…
There is a file format difference between Rhino 5 and Rhino 6, Rhino 6 will open Rhino 5 files but not the other way around. GH 1 files made with Rhino V6 are not backwards-compatible to GH 0.9x in Rhino V5.
So yes, Rhino 6 is an important tool for Grasshopper in the future…
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Looks like I’ll need to buy the upgrade then, thanks a lot.
Well, yes and no. The file format is the same and apart from a version warning it will work, however there are many new components in GH1 for Rhino6 that will not deserialize on earlier versions because they do not exist there. As time goes on, the two versions will drift further and further apart and you’ll get more and more compatibility problems trying to open new files on old versions.
David, why does GH0 simply remove the missing component with all the links? Troubleshooting would be a lot easier if it would rather be replaced with a flashing red-green-yellow-and-black BIOHAZARD component!
Jonas
Same reason a lot of other functionality isn’t there, it would have taken time to write it and there’s a limited number of hours in my day. Sure, would have been nice if standard components or free floating parameters were replaced with some visual clue, but since each object is fully responsible for its own (de)serialisation, it can be really difficult to figure out how something is supposed to behave if you don’t know what it is.
The sad reality is that usability and QA are extremely low priorities at McNeel.
Whoa, hold your horses, Joseph. 
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No sir, this is a disaster. The incompatibilities between R5 and R6 for the simplest components like Multiplication, Subtraction and EvalSrf create MAJOR HEADACHES if you do any real work while evaluating R6 and then choose to work on those files in R5. The error messages in R5 are useless for finding and fixing the problems. Seriously David, the lack of consideration is outrageous. Extremely frustrating and very, very rude.
Oh, and here’s a nasty little surprise. It’s July 2, I thought I had three more days in the eval period but no!??!?
So what. Buy it. You get all kinds of functionality, and tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of design effort, for a few hundred dollars. Not to mention the access and ideas presented on this forum; in a week’s time the equivalent of several masters’s and doctorial thesis’s worth of computational geometry are presented. And I don’t even have to fly 6 time zones to participate in the discussion.
So what. If that ain’t worth a few bucks, go home and hang up your T square.
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I’m pretty sure he did. Joseph just wants to keep working on both R5 and R6 and is running into issues where data generated with newer versions doesn’t load on older versions.
Had the same warning yesterday. Just clicked on the link, logged into my McNeil account and it was everything ok. (I bought rh6)
Pancake is absolutely useless for resolving the incompatibilities between GH 0.9 and 1.0. The very basic components I mentioned create unbridgeable gaps in Grasshopper between R5 and R6, even though they are identical in function. This was obvious and could easily have been avoided.
98% of this forum is either kiddie pool nonsense from newbies who haven’t bothered to read it before asking the same questions over and over OR genuine bug reports. The signal-to-noise ratio is very low. While @DavidRutten does a great job, he is absurdly over-qualified for dealing with the diaper crowd.
I reject the rationale that users must allocate a disproportionate amount of time to reporting and coping with glaring bugs as a reasonable price to pay for bleeding edge software.
Yep. Lots of noise right here…
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The potential is there in R6++ – as well as the forum – to make the most flexible and productive cad system available. I am going to do my best to move these ideas forward – because to not due so would mean going back to tyrannical grips of Autodesk. #neveragain
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I sometimes learn more from beginner questions than everything else. There are over 2,000? grasshopper components now, and it seems I only use, at most, maybe 300 of them?
case in point, a basic question here a few days ago, how to extract a subcurve, with a great response by HS Kim (thank you!) inspired an idea for me, and led me to develop an entirely new approach to one of my old designs, with a great new subtle variation. Why did I need to hear a basic question from a beginner to trigger an idea in my mind? I have no idea. Why had I not used this component before? Also no idea. But I wouldn’t miss the observations and basic questions from beginners; they are the most illuminating of all. Great stuff. So yo all the newbies here, keep at, ask away, I will read all of it with interest, and we all will try to have intelligent responses for you, if we do not, then we do not understand it well enough to explain it to you.
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There’s a Downgrade feature.
No, that is not true. There is no automatic fix for using any of the GH R6 components that are incompatible with R5 GH, even the ones who’s names, purpose and inputs/outputs didn’t change at all.
But it’s worse than that. In a complex GH model, curves and surfaces don’t always behave the same way in R5 vs. R6. When you spend the time in R6 to track down and “fix” these anomalies, the code will then fail in R5 GH. They REALLY are not compatible.
As I said two months ago, the transition from R5 to R6 is a one-way street, there is no going back. It is very disruptive in unpleasant ways. Abandon all hope (for R5 compatibility) — Ye Who Enter Here.
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