You’re right. I feel compelled to say it again: the documentation for everything you see in Grasshopper, particularly native components and data tree explanations, needs to be complete, up-to-date, maintained, consolidated, and obvious. Instead, it’s all been an incomplete patchwork from too many sources and eras, and this leads to frustration from users new and old trying to use it well.
That doesn’t mean it should be harder to double click and discover new things on the canvas, or browse the forums and get hints about how to tackle a problem. Quite the opposite - with better documentation, we’d have oceans of fewer and less confused people, myself included.
To all the guys complaining about how difficult Gh is: can you name any pro software that is easy from the get go? Revit? Blender? Name one.
Everything takes time and , in my opinion, GH with it’s almost perfect canvas is fairly easy to learn.
I don’t believe in learning from videos. I used only real problems with predictable feedback, starting from most simple ones like lines rotating around point. I was creating ‘problems to solve’ and then trying to find a solution.
I can understand the fear when one is looking at the ribbon with 30-40 plugins polluting the canvas (VisualARQ is one of the worst) thinking "I will never learn that’, but vanilla GH is clean and friendly.
PS I moved to Rhino from AutoCAD, so drafting was piece of cake. To understand the modelling techniques and the concept of the software I set the goal of 2-5 commands to learn daily. In a month I felt comfortable, in 3 months I dropped AutoCAD and never returned.
It is, no doubt about that. But it’s so haphazardly documented that the user has to wade through an internet forum to cobble together a library of useful information, little of which is guaranteed to be fully current, reliable or version-compliant. Learning software takes time and effort, yes, but the lack of good documentation in Grasshopper is just an unforced error.
I mean, the best explanations for data trees are posted by David on the old Grasshopper forum, including a 6-part vimeo series, from ten years ago. A bunch of native components don’t even have useful right click help files. Useful information does exist, as does this forum, but, again, you have to blunder through the internet to try to find it and it cannot be trusted out of the box.
Imagine a world in which the documentation for GH was as good as the software…
I think the best learning resources are here, at this forum. Lots of friendly people happy to share their knowledge, even do the stuff for you.
It even happens to me to ask for help, once or twice in a month, and there is no shame if you don’t know the stuff.
Beside, it is exciting to discover new functionality, like wandering in Amazonia and seeing new species Today I’ve learnt about Item Index.
I know. I’m grateful for the forum, and I use it, too. But that’s not good enough. It’s a stopgap measure. I feel I need to say it again: we should not need an internet connection to use the software at its basic, fundamental levels.
Revit was easier for me. So was AutoCAD. With AutoCAD, I was able to get further faster using AutoLISP programming. Same with Dynamic Blocks. Same with Revit Families (although I didn’t really enjoy working with them I could get the results I wanted).
The difference between those programs and GH is that I would learn those programs as I worked in them and completed real projects. The biggest difference is that I constantly have to go on Google to search for solutions to certain things. Stuff isn’t named intuitively. Even the same functions in Rhino have different names in GH sometimes.
As an example of the hurdles I had to get over, It took me a good 20 minutes to figure out how to add parameters to a C# script component (applies to several other components of course). You just zoom in I know… but how would I know that? And this is just one example.
It’s worse than it is because reference material is so patchy. So these little things add up when you’re first learning.
That sounds arbitrary and very restrictive, Probably 100% of what I know about video editing software came from YouTube tutorials. Many of them! All for one product.
Good and fine contributions from around the world online are good, fine, and welcome. I rely on them too. But they should exist in addition to complete documentation included with the software.
People learn differently. Reading documentation puts me to sleep. Video tutorials can be way more effective. So is finding, reading and understanding code from other people who have solved the issue before you, No Internet connection cuts you off from reading this forum. That’s no solution.
'Fraid not. You are inferring something I never claimed. I said we should not need an internet connection. Today, we do, because the built in documentation is lacking.
'Fraid so. Your position about not depending on Internet access is untenable, drop it and move on. Documentation and tutorials do not have to be built in. I would say that HTML documentation (with hyperlinks) is the best way to keep it updated. Extensive API documentation for many programming languages has been done that way for decades. So have forums like this one and Stack Overflow:
Saying none of these widely used tools can be parts of the solution is not correct.
this whole thread itself even started with a complaint on how much it was difficult to understand how to reference Rhino stuff in Grasshopper
I’m truly happy this discussion is alive, and I have been waiting 20+ days, reading every single reply, without commenting, just to see where the river was flowing… and what I see is mostly users who clearly have not studied the matter, complaining for the matter to be too much complicated to deal with
I wrote “mostly” because there are also very interesting points of discussion and improvement, but generally speaking, the topic is “why is this not so easy that I even have to read the instructions?!”
@keithscadservices of course this is not directed to you but the reply button links my answer to your reply, so I just wanted to make it straight
if anyone feels like he has studied the GH matter but was still not able to do something, please write your story, I’ll be happy to contraddict proving you haven’t even studied the GH Primer
I was touching on the fact that certain operations in GH are named much differently than the same operation in Rhino. This doesn’t really help address that in any way. It only takes maybe 30 minutes, an hour to figure it out. but when there’s so many other things that require an extra 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour… there’s only so many hours in a day.
Jumping in a bit late to the conversation, but allow me to express my viewpoint. While I acknowledge the sentiment that Grasshopper may not immediately strike newcomers as highly intuitive upon opening the tab, I suggest maintaining a broader perspective.
To start, GH has been around for a while now, so of course things could be better. Let’s not forget GH pioneered this type of interface. Despite this, GH stands out as the most user-friendly nodal interface compared to its counterparts.
Those who’ve explored alternatives like Dynamo (Revit), Scene Nodes (Cinema4D), Nodes (Blender), and similar know how steep the learning curve on those can be. There is no way you are going to figure anything out without watching many tutorials first, even after doing so they are very obscure.
Lastly, this community is gold and has no match in all those alternatives. In no other place can you post your files/screenhost asking for help and get your files corrected or example files returned in a matter of hours.
Software being intuitive is nice, but the general expectation some users are expressing here is simply outside the realms of reality.
The notion that the user should instinctively and automatically know how to use the software merely by glancing at the interface is utopic.
Nothing in life works this way. Reality dictates that in order to learn anything you need to invest time to learn fundamentals through reading documentation, watching tutorials, or examining example files.
If the original poster had directed the time spent on posting this thread and responding to multiple replies toward learning GH, he would already be well on his way.
Anyways… re-reading my last reply it comes across as a bit rude. Especially given (most) everything here has been so constructive. I appreciated all that information.
This post WILL be my reference for GH in the future haha! Lots of what’s been discussed and shared will make things so much easier going forward.
It sure would be nice, and commensurate with the professional quality of GH, if the primer itself were updated to reflect software releases, and obvious and available when you install/open the software.
Edit to say: I know the primer is just a short intro - I imagine it would be rather easy to keep updated, although I don’t know if the writer (Andy Payne?) is still involved with the host. A complete set of current help documentation from McNeel is what Grasshopper needs!
Today I’ve learnt about Item Index.
