With Grasshopper2 in alpha, I thought I’d begin exploring the process of porting over some LunchBox tools. It is still very early days and I expect that there will be many changes to the the G2 SDK as it develops. Look for updates on this thread to track progress and get new download links.
The current focus is to migrate over essential LunchBox tools:
Data: Create and parse data structures including datasets and CSV.
Generate: Novel tessellation and fractal algorithms.
Mass: Create building floor/volume arrays constrained by area and floor boundary shapes.
Mesh: Utilities for mesh manipulation
Panel: Tesselate surfaces with panel divisions including triangle, quadrangles, and hexagons.
Solid: Platonic solid shapes.
Structure: Tesselate surfaces with line-based divisions.
Surface: Mathematical surfaces including Klein and Mobius.
Utility: A handful of utilities including Brep Shell, Brep Unroll, and Arc divide.
Vector: Vector based algorithms and attractors.
Workflow: Excel read/write, and Text read/write (with toggles).
To install:
Download, unblock, and unzip LunchBox G2 from the links below.
Install Grasshopper2 through the Rhino 8 or 9 WIP package manager.
Run the G2PluginViewer command in Rhino
Choose “+ Install a Plugin Manually”
Navigate and select the LunchBoxG2.rhp included in the above link
Run G2 to open Grasshopper2. Look for the LunchBox menu tab!
A new alpha build of LunchBox G2 is available. This release focused on porting some data formatting tools to Grasshopper2 along with creating a new Excel writer to creating multi-table workbooks.
We had a great set of workshops at AEC Tech this past week in New York! As part of the Plugin Workshop, I announced that LunchBox for Grasshopper2 will be an open source project going forward! In these early days of G2 adoption, I hope the work here can help others get oriented with creating their own tools plugins.
There is still plenty of work to be done and we must all remember that G2 is still in ‘alpha’… which means change is part of the game.
The original LunchBox plugin never quite made it to having it’s source code published (apart from the machine learning tools). This is because LunchBox had been put together over a lengthy timeline… starting when I was first learning to code. LunchBox G2 has given me a chance to revisit all of my old code, clean things up, refactor, and reorganize. I feel comfortable putting this code out in the wild now
I hope it’s useful. In the meantime, expect more updates to the plugin very soon!
Another artifact from the AEC Tech G2 workshops: a LunchBox definition sample with some classic surface tessellation development… (ghz is attached below)
