Online preview of GH definitions - is it worth it?

[Czaja (Jakub Czajczynski)]

@DavidRutten , recently you made a great move with implementing Placeholder components. Thanks a lot!

This provoked me to made this topic about ease of sharing GH definitions between people.

Would GH community benefit if Grasshopper files could be previewed online in a quick and easy manner? Ideally, something like this could be implemented into discourse, so uploaded Grasshopper files would be translated into something like this:

PasteBin blueprints For Unreal Engine 4

https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/uem8y5oh/

This is Blueprint Viewer for the UE4 Blueprints. Nodes can be window selected and copy-pasted directly into the program.

The danger is that people who want to help will get a bit lazy and will try to answer questions without downloading GH definition and testing it by themselves so error rate among their proposals may rise.

I don’t know if making a tool like that is worth the effort but streamlining exchange of ideas between people is always tempting.

[gankeyu (Keyu Gan)]

I have an oversimplified tool that converts GH file into a very simple image (since we need to render everything ourselves) without Grasshopper (but of course it requires GH_IO).

Honestly, I don’t see a very large demand for why we are doing so. Grasshopper doesn’t take a very long time or a project environment to start. And I would say it’s much more important to see how data flows through components, rather than how the components are organized.