Grasshopper 0.5 released – with scripting!

Parametric panel cut pattern created with Grasshopper
Parametric panel cut pattern created with Grasshopper

Can’t wait to try out the new version of Grasshopper for Rhino. The latest major (well, a round-ish 0.5 at least) release is now available from McNeel.

Updates include:

– New file format (see wiki page for details:
http://en.wiki.mcneel.com/default.aspx/McNeel/Grasshopper_FileFormat….
)
– New command: GrasshopperDeveloperSettings. Allows for special
loading sequences of components, handy for debugging. Not useful for
regular users.
– Component popup search dialog. Double click on the canvas (on an
empty spot) and start typing. No more navigating through tabs and
panels if you know what you want.
– Memory footprint of runtime solutions has been reduced significantly
for certain kinds of networks because many unnecessary data
duplications have been removed.
– Vastly improved ‘Manage Collection’ editor.
– Better help topics for some components. (Just started writing those
today so I didn’t get very far. The components in Logic (Lists & Sets)
are finished)
– C# and VB.NET scripting components; look in the Logic->Script panel.
– BarGraph component for realtime visualization for large amounts of
numbers.
– Optional input parameters no longer throw warnings when they remain
empty; fewer orange components on the screen.
– Clipboard operations now use the windows clipboard so you can copy
paste between Rhino sessions.
– Clipboard operations now use Xml serialization instead of byte-
arrays, so you can also copy/paste to and from text editors (provided
they support unicode characters).
– Arc curve base type.
– Time primitive base type (not used anywhere yet).
– Domain and Range settings for Graph mapper objects. (grip dragging
is buggy when using non-default domains… this will be fixed soon).
– ‘Escape = Close’ logic for all dialogs (unless I missed one).
– Post-It notes have input and output grips.
– Post-It notes can write their contents to text files.
– Post-It notes now have custom Font settings.
– Post-It notes have scroll bars for when the content size exceeds the
screen size.
– Better Point parameter picker logic.
– Named views can be deleted through the named view menu (click on the
red X).
– Grid lines on the canvas fade out at low zoom factors; less clutter
when zooming out.
– Fibonacci sequence component.
– Jitter component.
– More Interval(2D) components.
– Mass addition, Mean (average) and Truncate components for dealing
with large amounts of numbers.
– Rotate plane component.
– Circle/Arc center and radius extractor.
– Explode curve component.
– Rectangle and Polygon components.
– Plane surface component.
– Flip surface component.
– Curve region union component.
– Mathematical intersection components (Ray-plane, Plane-curve, Ray-
Surface, Curve-ray etc.).
– More options for the Loft component (Loose, Tight, Rebuild etc.).
– Curve Perpendicular frames component now provide true ‘zero-twisting-
frames’.
– Number slider expressions now use slider name as variable.- Whatever else I forgot to mention.
– Loads of bug fixes (we’ve at least tried to fix all bugs which have
been reported through the crashdump system)

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