Rhino Grasshopper Web Application Framework Presentation

This past few months we have rolled out some projects that allow Rhino/Grasshopper geometry and our geometry engine to be accessed from almost anywhere.

Here is a presentation by Steve Baer presenting how our technologies can be used to create web applications. The first 20 minutes is the overview and the rest is a workshop digging into the code.

This ties together these 3 projects:

  1. Rhino Compute - online accessible geometry calculator
  2. Rhino3DM.js - JavaScript library to access and manipulate geometry independent of Rhino. There is also a 3DMLoader included with Three.js which can be tested in the Three.js Editor
  3. Rhino Compute Appserver - an Application manager between client apps and cloud services including private compute.rhino3d servers.

We would love any feedback

23 Likes

Hello! This is amazing, thanks for making it so publicly available.

Iā€™m trying to get it running locally and when running compute as a debug build in Visual Studio Iā€™m running into the error:

ā€œThe debug executable ā€˜C:\Usersā€¦\compute.geometry.exeā€™ specified in the ā€˜compute.geometryā€™ debug profile does not exist.ā€

Iā€™m not a developer (engineer who uses Grasshopper a lot), but Iā€™m trying to get this running for a proof-of-concept project. Iā€™m not sure if this is an issue on my end with Visual Studio or if something is out of date, etc., so I figured Iā€™d post here to see if itā€™s a known hiccup. Iā€™m running Visual Studio 2019 (professional) on a fresh install and the compute files are downloaded/unzipped into the directory.

If anyone can please point me in the right direction to troubleshoot this that would be much appreciated. Thank you in advance!

Hi,
I tried to put into place this framework (local debug, no deployment yet) and I have issues getting a view of the geometry in the web app. I am testing the spiky ball example.
The 3D model does not appear. When I change the parameters, the geometry seems to be loading with the new inputs but nothing is rendered in the web app.
If anyone could help, that would be nice.
Hugues

Are you still having problems with this? You might want to look at your developer panel in your browser to see if any errors are being reported.

Hello, I donā€™t know if you still have the issue but I went threw today.

Solution is that you have to ā€œBuildā€ the project in the first place (Right click on compute.geometry, if no working ā€œRe-buildā€ ā€¦ then some issues can appearā€™s to help you understand why it doesā€™nt have automatically build).

Hi Steve,

Is the video outdated? I cloned this repo and jumped on branch 7.x (I assumed for Rhino 7?) and the folder looks a bit different. Thanks

The video was from 4 years ago so yes it is probably a little out of date. What is it you are trying to do?

So we would like to have a web app that has some inputs when user plays around with it, data will be sent to a small Grasshopper script with our customized component. This component will create some simple geometry and show it back onto the web app. Then when the user is happy they can save input values into a JSON file in their own PC.
If you could please point me in the right direction on how to create the web app it would be greatly appreciated! I can code in C# and Python (from the background of mechatronic engineering) and have been creating customized Grasshopper component for the last few years but have zero experience on creating a web app (including aws, node.jsā€¦). I think we would need a different Rhino license as well?
Thank you.

Hello, I cannot create the Compute.Frontend and Compute.Geometry files that you opened in Visual Studio. Can you help me with this?

Hi donā€™t know if this is still relevant for you but youā€™re looking at the compute repo. You also want to use the webapp repo that can be found here (js based)