Well I definitely disagree with saying you can’t teach the design process. Good tutorials don’t edit out mistakes, but include how you fix them. That’s the design process. How many times have you tried to fix someone else’s geometry in Rhino and it’s just missing a simple boundary. And shoot…networkSrf is failing. Zoom in. Hmm, looks like it’s joined. So in a tutorial, they’ll just say to fill it with a network surface, and Maybe try a 1 rail sweep. But when neither of those work, you do things like explode the polysurface, join it again. Try again. No? Double check tolerances. Select bad? Hmm, recreate the neighboring fillets. And bam, you’ve fixed it.
If no one shows things like that, then you never learn how to fix them.
That’s a big problem I see with many tutorials. They often show you the end of what you are making, but don’t tell you Why they are doing something, what it’s for, or generally the direction they are headed. It’s almost like you’re just playing follow the leader until you get to the end and you’ve made the same thing they did.
Anyway, this discussion is great, and clearly I’m not the only person who is/was having troubles finding a place for grasshopper in their workflow. Although, based on some of what I’m hearing, I’m not sure it will ever make it into my workflow. When someone says “Hey, can you make this pattern on this surface” they expect it to not take more than a day or two.
But if you actually organize your nodes and files well, you can likely reuse previously built scripts to accomplish something like that in a day. Often times it’s looking at creating 6 different patterns in 2 different overall shapes.
I have ways of doing that, but in polys. Other processes are getting more parametric also, but won’t be production ready for a few months.
If you really wanted to, you could make something fully parametric. Someone here mentioned you couldn’t, and although that may be true in Practice, it’s not actually true. You could do it, but It’s just not really Worth it. There are more appropriate software for doing things like that.
Hopefully I’ll see some people showing examples of how they used grasshopper in actually released product design. Maybe that will expand my view on how it is used. Otherwise, it looks like I’ll just practice with a few patterns here and there when I have time.