If I cannot reason with an interface, I don’t bother with it.
The simplest thing, like an expectation such as: I select an object in Rhino. Open grasshopper. I look for a big huge RED button button that says “do something with this geometry”, but don’t see it. Click around the tabs and nothing jumps out as relevant. I look at the help menu, I see a list of theoretical stuff, like “inputs and “maths”, “interpolating values”, wires” etc. So, I realize I have to spend six months on theory about how to get this thing started, so I close it back down and write a script instead.
8 Likes
Maybe I’m getting old but I struggled with the interface at first. Double-clicking, right clicking. It is a good system overall (or it wouldn’t be so popular) but it can be unintuitive in some ways.
My biggest gripe is that there’s no definitive resource; there’s no “Grasshopper Step-by-Step” that I know of. Nor a 1-stop guide for the various shortcuts. I feel like my learning is basically at a snails pace.
And then there’s the baking… that’s the big killer for me. Anything I create I can’t really do much with. So anything I do create has to be relatively simple. But in that case I can just model it right?
There’s plugins that help immensely of course but which ones? And do those ones provide good direction? So much stuff is very capable, but the developer(s) burn out before they can create an adequate user manual.
People have made some amazing stuff with Grasshopper. And as far as I know, it’s the most popular one of this style of interface.
3 Likes
So true! Not intuitive. Every “pro” around here can tell you now what to do - create a parameter component that fits the object type - right click it, and down in some bloated context menu choose ‘set one input’, or ‘set multiple inputs’ - would anyone call this intuitive?
(In Grasshopper 2 it’s a bit different, simpler even, afaik)
Among all things questionable in Rhino’s UX, this is a very good example.
There’s a new Bake component at last now, that saves the trouble of baking manually. Got to know this, anyway.
I never liked the concept myself. Why the heck does anyone have to bake anything in the first place? Yes, yes, performance…
GH feels a bit like a ‘parasite’, hugging in Rhino’s face, sucking on it’s scene data, and shtng something back out when squeezed… =D
And please, McNeel, would you bother bringing GH-driven dynamic blocks?
4 Likes
How did you learn to code?
I guess it could be more intuitive to connect geometry to grasshopper but claiming you need 6 months on theory about how to get things started is quite an exaggoration imo.
4 Likes
I don’t get this answer… Way back in the day, you wrote some amazing scripts and I imagine you still do… You had to learn that stuff somehow.
Grasshopper is not a modeling interface, it’s a programming interface. As you can already script, I would expect the exact opposite of your comment to be true - it should be much more familiar to you then someone who has never done any scripting/programming.
If you do that and you want to write a script instead, you will be faced with the exact same problem - there is no “big red button” in scripting and so you will have to go searching for all the various input methods that are available to get your Rhino object into the script as data - GetObject() etc.
There’s not enough stuff here?
And here:
If it’s canvas/keyboard shortcuts you are looking for, there is also this old document which can be found with a bit of searching:
Grasshopper Shortcuts.pdf (161.3 KB)
8 Likes
I think Thomas’ point is not that he personally could not learn it (of course he could), but that it should be more intuitive/simpler to learn. That’s a valid point.
The moment we learned something, maybe the hard way, we are so proud of it that we forget how much simpler it could have been in the first place.
(Where’s Clippy the paperclip when you need him?)
Absolutly true Eugen
Thomas, maybe you code like you breathe, not me.
In my opinion Grasshopper is easier to learn compared with Py (which I failed to learned on my own)
also I learn Gh 8 years ago reading this forum, at this time, almost no yt tutorial video was online.
You basically proved the point. A call for ergonomic simplicity is answered with information overload. If graphical programming is as cognitively expensive as regular programming, then what’s the hell is point at all ? Simply reshuffling concepts from text to pictures with no true gain ? Why would the link from Rhino to Grasshopper be so obscure that I have to read gobs of tutorials to even get something going ? If you are going to force me to start doing mental reps, I’d rather script.
That’s Blender territory. Just yesterday I fired up Blender to open someone’s file and it opened on a single viewport. I had to spent half an hour figuring out how to turn on four viewport mode. Pressing every icon on sight and chasing menus. Gave up and started looking online. For a frikin 4-view mode. Then it all started again on how to deselect things on-screen, because clicking on empty spaces did nothing. I have developed a very short fuse for tone deaf designs and people using the term “It’s ok once you get used to it”.
4 Likes
The point is that it is real-time whereas scripting is not. Plus some of the stuff you can do with it would require millions of lines to code and months of testing/debugging scripts.
That is of course, your choice.
3 Likes
The most difficult thing on scripting is how to find the “bible” of Rhino-common methods, and which libraries are importable. This is basically another website ergonomics issue on how much fluff they put you through on the website before getting to the things that matter.
2 Likes
Yes it’s done by double clicking the component. Much quicker 
1 Like
What would the “big huge RED button” do? I almost never use Rhino anymore, except once in awhile to create a curve to be used by GH. So the idea that GH should “do something with this geometry” is a fallacy, a misunderstanding of how GH is used.
GH2 is a myth. It’s been discussed for many years (at least 8?), yet never materializes. If/when it ever does, I would bet that compatibility with legacy versions will be zero.
Evidently so. To the point it’s become an obstacle to learning.
5 Likes
The least discoverable part and the whole point of this thread.
(If I have an obstacle to learning, you may have an obstacle to thinking).
The point is not whether features exist at all, but whether they are actually discoverable. If we go by features existing, then Blender is awesome too.
2 Likes
OK, if you are going to be a jerk I’ll gladly ignore you.
3 Likes
You started the insulting innuendos and then feel insulted. So, yes, go away.
5 Likes
I learned gh by simply trying, using it, playing with it.
No tutorial, no readings… I just tried.
I had almost no experience in general about programming/coding/scripting.
You either learn it out of curiosity or need.
If you don’t have one of those, it’s understandable.
If you want to learn it, maybe start with something really simple. Ask in the forum here.
But you need a goal, a target.
8 Likes
Blender IS awesome.
But you can understand the lack of order/structure given it is a free software… A patchwork of contributions from many different coders…
That picture is funny
Rhino and GH UI are pretty straightforward instead… Can’t really compare them with the picture.
4 Likes
I second that, the goal is most important.
I’m curious though, @ThomasAn would you still consider learning GH or did we loose the battle already?
1 Like
Yes, I definitely learned scripting “the hard way” - I downloaded David’s Rhinoscript 101 primer at the time, read through it many times and tried to understand. Some of it did sink in, but then I also took a class. Fortunately we had a great teacher! Afterwards it was just practice, practice, practice.
Dunno - concerning scripting/programming, is there really a simpler, more intuitive way to learn? It’s a very abstract set of concepts actually - variables, loops, conditionals, inputs, outputs, etc. Plus of course all the “bridge” elements to Rhino - Rhinoscript(syntax) for starters, and then the jump to OOP with Python/RhinoCommon which is far more abstract still.
I personally found GH much easier to learn than scripting, but I already had the scripting foundation, so I knew what was flowing through those wires more or less. Plus the components are a lot more “intelligent” and flexible than strict coding.
In any case all that hard-earned and prideful knowledge has (or soon will have) no real value anymore as people can just have ChatGPT write their scripts for them. GH definitions won’t be all that far behind either.
1 Like
I was more referring to the way GH ‘interacts’ with the Rhino scene.
I tried generating a simple Python script myself, using Bing AI. Didn’t work… code looked correct, but there was an error in the way the SDK works.
Few days ago a colleague quickly generated a python script with chatgpt that swapped the object color with the layer color. Worked.
Yes, it started…
2 Likes