Rhino & Grasshopper Plugins for Building Computation & Optimizations

Grashopper has a wide set of plugins which can increase the wide range of applicability of grashopper While Grasshopper itself is a plugin for rhino, there are many individual plugins for each of these separately to increase the productivity of their usage.

With the increasing usage of computation in building design, it is also important to know that there are plugins which can give us the best possible solutions for a given set of parameters provided by us.Plugins like Ladybug, Honey-bee, Geco, Galapagos(pre-installed in grasshopper), for Grasshopper & Diva for Rhino etc.., can help us in creating an environmentally-conscious architectural design.

Here is a few list of plugins along with video links that I found would be helpful in understanding the usage of these plugins:

Galapagos in Grasshopper (Pre-installed):

In a brief Galapagos is an Evolutionary Problem Solver in grasshopper that tests all the values and gives us the best possible value(in the number slider) for a specified end result.

Galapagos Overview
Parametric Twisted Tower using grasshopper and Galapagos (PS: Video in Spanish)
Example Tutorial of Finding the fittest 3-dimensional form that yields the lowest amount of solar radiation using Ecotect & Galapagos

Geco for Grasshopper:

Similar to Autodesk Ecotect,Geco is designed for early stages of conceptual design and encourages play to understand environmental factors and interactions.

Diva for Rhino:

Unlike all the plugins mentioned here, which are grasshopper plugins, Diva is an Environmental Analysis Plugin for Rhino that works directly with Rhino.

Parametric Facade Optimization using Rhino-Grasshopper-DIVA-Galapagos
Basic Introduction Tutorial: Introduction to Diva for Rhino 3 - Daylight Analysis Simulation

Elk for Grasshopper:

Elk is a plugin used to generate topographies and street maps using data from OpenStreetMap.org and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data from NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Elk 2 Introduction
Basic Overview Tutorials of Elk for both Grasshopper & Dynamo, from the Plugin Developer
Site Modeling : Elk Grasshopper Tutorial

Photoshop to GH live link:

Andrew Heumann is developing a set of components for grasshopper to create a live link between grasshopper & photoshop to manipulate the grasshopper geometry using photoshop. You can manipulate photoshop using grasshopper too.

In his Grasshopper page , he provides videos showing a demo of the project.

Anemone for Grasshopper (Animation):

an example video by Rese-arch
another example

Mixed Usage:

Energy Efficiency in Parametric Algorithmic Architectural Design

Comments

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