Descriptors.c
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Dean Camera authored
Add const to all project descriptor definitions for safety.
Dean Camera authoredAdd const to all project descriptor definitions for safety.
Rhino/Grasshopper
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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.