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.

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