Wish Grasshopper windows with gradient transparent background

[gustojunk (Gustavo Fontana)]

Hi David, All,

You know the drill when working with a laptop/single monitor: a constant dance of window arranging, or double-clicking GH window bar, or alt+Tab to switch between GH/Rhino windows.

simple example of problem, trying to work on these two windows at once:

proposed solution, Grasshopper window has a gradient slider in the canvas area to let you see through it:

you can move the two sliders that define when the full opacity of the GH canvas background starts/stops

The gradient’s length can be minimized to a very quick transition, just enough to make it clear that there is some masking going on:

[Michael_Pryor (ekim)]

Transparent background

An announcement for GH Online Training yesterday, and more specifically, the illustration image in that post: [image] At work, I put the GH editor window on one screen and have a Rhino viewport available on my other screen. When not at work, I only have my laptop screen and am constantly moving the GH editor out of the way or double-clicking the title bar to minimize the editor. What if the editor was transparent and one can see the Rhino viewport behind it?

The transparent idea

I can’t seem to find a comfortable layout to work in Grasshopper. Although I have a 4K - 32" screen, with Rhino and Grasshopper side-by-side, I always feel in a cramped condition. GH definitions are typically elongated horizontally, which does not help. I wonder if the solution would be to have a “Canvas transparency” slider in the GH UI, so that, while still having the pointer focus in GH, the Rhino UI could be seen underneath. [CanvasAlpha]

Transparent canvas, wormhole to Rhino Viewport.

[gustojunk (Gustavo Fontana)]

Lots of good ideas there. Also I agree with David that true transparency is just terrible. I know Dynamo does it, but I can’t imagine working that way. Maybe it’s cool for documenting/taking screenshots once you arrange things neatly for a picture taking day, not as a working mode.

This is what the example I posted above looks like with true transparency:

This is the kind of amateur UX work that gives me nightmares.

[ANDhitecture (Toshe Andon)]

You should try Wormhole. It works very well, and it does pretty much what you want.

[gustojunk (Gustavo Fontana)]

That’s neat, but no it doesn’t solve any of the UX challenges I’m struggling with. It’s still some form of discrete rectangular window-arrangements, which is what I’m trying to avoid completely.

[Michael_Pryor (ekim)]

I posted that two comments up

[Michael_Pryor (ekim)]

It is easy to make the entire GH window transparent via windows forms in C# however, it gives everything part of the GH window an opacity, not just the canvas. I believe I saw this from David Rutten some time ago. Will drop this here for the sake of the discussion, even though it is not ideal.

GrasshopperWindowOpacity.gh (3.5 KB)

[ANDhitecture (Toshe Andon)]

@Michael_Pryor

I posted that two comments up

Oh, sorry I didn’t check the thread through.
But yes, Wormhole is ‘sort of’ a solution. I find it very useful and use it all the time.

@gustojunk

That’s neat, but no it doesn’t solve any of the UX challenges I’m struggling with. It’s still some form of discrete rectangular window-arrangements, which is what I’m trying to avoid completely.

I understand it’s not ideal, but it’s closest to a transparent work-surface.
Transparent background [or dedicated viewport window for Gh] is a thing that people are asking as far as I can remember.

Your “concept” seems interesting. Maybe you should build it

[Louis_Leblanc]

I use TopMostViewPort and it works quite well for me. Still rectangular window management but once setup I don’t really change much and can adjust the viewport size by simply dragging the top right corner. Of course you could have Grasshopper full size but I like seeing the command line, layers/properties panel, osnaps, etc.

Topmost Viewport

[gustojunk (Gustavo Fontana)]

@ANDhitecture

Your “concept” seems interesting. Maybe you should build it

I’m just ‘the idea guy’
I don’t know how to code. Only clicking and dragging all day.

[gustojunk (Gustavo Fontana)]

That does look very good. I’ll definitely use that for now. Thanks Louis!

[thomas_parel]

Gustavo- This is a problem that many node based editors face. Blender’s compositor solves the issues you talk about in a relatively flexible way- you can either work in a separate window or overlay

It can be a very interactive way of working the nodes. There shouldn’t be a reason you can do a gradient fading overlay of the window- although that would be a new UI paradigm - but that said it doesnt seem that we have figured out the best way to integrate nodes into Rhino proper.