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)