New user - Reusing grasshopper objects

Grasshopper
1

Hello all,

I’m new to Rhino so please forgive me of I get some terminology wrong.

I’m trying to work out how I can use a grasshopper component multiple times in a project, while retaining its procedural abilities.

Ill give you my specific use case for context.

I have a complex shape I have created in grasshopper. I want to use this component to difference boolean several different objects in Rhino. I will need to do this on many objects. Then I will tweak the parameters in my grasshopper object to experiment with different clearances.

Im trying to work out how to approach this. I will need to use this same cutting object across multiple different rhino documents.

For example I start a rhino session and build out 5 forms, some of them need 1 cutter, some of them need 2 cutters.

Now in a new document I made a few more forms, these also require cutters.

It seems like the only way to handle this would be to maintain seperate grasshopper documents for each rhino document.

But imagining the workflow, this seems a bit painful. Am I missing something?

Is there a way to use a grasshopper as a reusable component?

2

You might want to look into clusters and user objects.

3

yes Ive been playing with Clusters and they are really useful for reusing components within a grasshopper document.

I think my issue is I’m coming at this from the wrong direction.

I’m thinking of my Grasshopper script as a single object. I then want to reuse this object several times in my rhino document.

What’s becoming clearer is that if I want multiple instances of the grasshopper object, I need to manage this inside Grasshopper, rather than inside Rhino.

I feel I need to think of this as ‘Grasshopper first’, rather than ‘Rhino first’.

4

Are you familiar with lists and data trees?

5

Yeah, but admittedly only vaguely, Im not certain how they’d be handy in this case

6

Instead of re-using the same process on multiple individual data streams, you can gather multiple lists into a tree and do the same or individualized operations on one tree.

If my guess is off, why don’t you come up with a Grasshopper definition for a simplified example of what you want to do?