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    Rhino/Grasshopper

    Rhino/Grasshopper

    Quick Links

    About

    Rhino is a CAD program that's particularly popular in the architecture world. Grasshopper is a dataflow algorithmic design plugin for Rhino. It was originally an extension that you'd have to download and install separately, but it became wildly popular and is now packaged with Rhino.

    On its own, Grasshopper is already a powerful tool for parametric and algorithmic design. It's been a mainstay of generative architecture for years. Traditionally, it's been used from within Rhino, but it's becoming easier and easier to run Rhino/Grasshopper "headless", i.e. from the command line and without a GUI. This is very helpful for full algorithmic design, where you may want to batch process thousands of variations.

    Since 2018, there has been a Python library called rhino3dm. This library allows you to read and write Rhino's .3dm CAD files. It also lets you construct geometry, but you're somewhat limited in which operations you can use. Closest point calculations, intersections, and tessallations, for example are off the table.

    But new in Rhino 7 is something called Rhino.Inside. Rhino.Inside allows Rhino to be embedded in other applications as a geometry/CAD kernel. One particulary interesting use of Rhino.Inside is Rhino Compute Server. This is a standalone (headless) server that exposes a REST API for basically all of Rhino. The server itself is a .NET application, and it comes with a Python library that lets us interact with the server. This is what we will be exploring here.

    Installing

    Rhino/Grasshopper

    Rhino 7 installers can be downloaded from here. Note that it's not free software, so you have to have a license to use it. In the School of Architecture and Planning here at MIT, we're lucky to have a department-wide license. Otherwise, McNeel offers free 90 day trials if you give them your email addresss. Rhino 7 includes Grasshopper.

    Rhino Compute Server

    To compile the server, you'll need to install Visual Studio. Instructions for this are here.

    You also need to install the Python library, which you can do using pip.

    python -m pip install compute_rhino3d

    Rhino3dm

    This one is just another pip call.

    python -m pip install rhino3dm

    CMA-ES