The Rhino 9 WIP now contains texture components. This makes it possible to create, edit, query and utilize procedural or bitmap textures within Grasshopper.
Procedural_Texture_GH_v9.gh (22.6 KB)
These new components are a work in progress meaning they are not meant for project critical production work just yet. The Rhino 9 WIP is available to anyone that owns Rhino 8.
Texture Components
The Rhino tab > Materials section, contains the texture types available. These textures can be pushed to the active Rhino document’s Textures panel or used within Grasshopper to create materials and edit geometry.
Most of these components are procedural textures controlled by various input parameters like those shown in the above example. To view the resulting texture you can use the Content Viewer component located in the Params tab > Utility section.
To adjust the repeat of a texture you can use the Texture Mapping Adjustment component in the Rhino tab > Materials section.
The Texture Slot component in this same location is useful in blending a texture with a color value or enabling/disabling the use of a texture in a specific channel of a material.
In the following example, the Query Directory component is used to reference a bitmap texture by name in the same directory as the Grasshopper file. The Content Cache component is also used to Push or Bake objects, materials or textures to the Rhino document. This can be set as an automatic action or manually triggered.
Query_Bitmap_GH_v9.zip (1.4 MB)
Also of note is the Texture Evaluator component which allows you to not only sample values from textures for physical transformations but can also be used to assign vertex colors to the resulting mesh.
Evaluate_Texture_GH_v9.gh (23.2 KB)
For simplicity, these new components can additionally be set to hide or show unused parameters via the right click menu over the center of each component. There’s a good deal of useful overlap between the new components for textures, materials and texture mapping so be sure to check out the other forum posts on those topics too.