Grasshopper Rhino: Save the state of nodes for comparing alternatives

Grasshopper is an awesome plugin for rhino which lets us customize the design using programmatic nodes. It is the best design conceptualization tool that I've found. There are few other similar software's like dynamo for Revit, Para 3d for 3ds max, but they all have their own limitations. But grasshopper is limited to your imagination and a little bit of understanding the plugin itself. Once you get the hand of the user interface and the nodes, you can almost design anything you want.

But, often times we might want to compare between alternative options of our own design. So going through each node and changing the values is time taking. So Grasshopper allows you to save the values/state of the nodes so that you can revert back to them with just a single click.

In the following example, I've got a simplistic script for a twisting tower where I want to compare between to alternatives. So I set the values of the 1st alternate and save it at Solution> Save state, which pops-up a window which let you select if you want to save few specific nodes or all the nodes and give a specific name for it.

Location of Save state option

Save state pop-up window

then you can change the values and save those values with a different name using the same process above.

After you've done the saving, you can go to Solution> Restore state> which gives you all of your saved states. You can toggle through the states and choose between your alternative for your final design form.

Restore Saved States

The following video by NYCCTfab shows how this technique can be used for design comparison.

Grasshopper: Managing Design Options with the Saved States from NYCCTfab on Vimeo.
This video will take a basic Grasshopper definition and discuss a method for iterating through design options using the Gh Saved States.

Comments

Power Query - "SUBSTITUTE" Function: Remove/Replace multiple values in a column in One Step.

Often times, when you get data from a source, there will most probably be something incorrect that needs to be fixed using an ETL process of Power Query. And most of those transformations would require either Replacing or Removing string's that are not necessary. For example, if you extract any financial data from a source which has multiple currency symbols, there's a chance that the numbers get extracted along with the currency symbols like "$700"/"€700" instead of 700. And these type of cases makes it tough to Transform the Data to our wish as the value will be considered as a text instead of a number. In those type of cases, we would most likely have to create multiple steps to remove the multiple currency symbols from the Column. But thanks to the solution provided by Marcel for one of the questions posted on Stack Overflow, with a little manipulation of the Query language (M), we can replace/Remove multiple strings in one step using the List. ...

Grasshopper: Voronoi Holes on a Planar surface

One of the best natural examples for a Voronoi is the Wing structure of a dragon fly.Grasshopper can help us to build a shape like this in Rhino. Image Courtesy: The Pond blog Grasshopper by default has a node for Voronoi, we just have to prepare the necessary information to feed into the node. The following example shows how to create a Voronoi shaped holes in a surface Create a planar Surface from rhino or grasshopper Randomly Populate the surface with points using the Populate 2D Node Feed the surface and the points into the Voronoi node and feed a number slider too to adjust eh radius This forms the required Voronoi structure which you can edit the number of points or radius. To create the holes we need to offset each and every inner portion towards its centre using the Scale node We can find the centre of each of the inner portions using Area node I'm not sure why but using the offset command su...

Grasshopper: offsetting curves on surface vs scaling curves on surface

Though in Grasshopper Offset and Scale are two different node functions, when it comes to a planar surface, the results of the both are similar. But, I found the " Scale" node to be effective when you want to loft the resultant curve with another. The following images show the different results of a Voronoi structure that yielded when scale and offset nodes are used. When the Offset node is used When Scale is used

Set/Change the True north Orientation of a Project in Revit(07 of 10)

In any Revit project, the orientation of the North is always set to the top of the screen. But this might not be the case with all the projects. All the projects are not oriented parallel to the North direction, and we might want to orient the project to the true north direction. In one of my previous posts, I have explained the difference between Project North & True North and how we can use them in any project. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to Set/Change the Orientation of True North. Go to any Plan view. Go to Manage tab in the ribbon and click on "Position" drop-down in the "Project Location" toolbar. Then choose "Rotate True North" from the drop-down list. Rotate True North This will show you 3 different ways to change the orientation of the True North. They are 1. Manual Rotation Upon clicking the "Rotate Ture North", Revit will automatically prompt you for manual rotation of the orientation. You can use...

Guru-G

Search This Blog