Nono Martinez Alonso: Hi, everyone! We're live.
Nono Martinez Alonso: This is Nono Martínez Alonso, and I have here Andy Payne with me.
Nono Martinez Alonso: We just played the podcast premiere for an episode that we actually recorded in September, 2022.
Nono Martinez Alonso: I'm happy to have Andy here to connect the dots on what we talked back then, what's changed, and maybe we can talk about a few things that I think have definitely changed or evolved.
Nono Martinez Alonso: Hey, it's Nono, and this is the Getting Simple Podcast.
Nono Martinez Alonso: Hi, Andy.
Andy Payne: Hey, Nono, how are you?
Nono Martinez Alonso: I'm good.
Nono Martinez Alonso: I kind of went through the episode to like create the chapters and see all the different topics and stuff.
Nono Martinez Alonso: And one of the things that I personally enjoyed a lot was learning about some of the new things of Grasshopper 2 and what you've also added to Grasshopper 1.
Nono Martinez Alonso: Maybe you can tell us a bit, something I didn't know about what's different between Grasshopper 1 and Grasshopper 2, why they're not merging so much in terms of just being an update of a software.
Nono Martinez Alonso: It's not like people can just start using the second version.
Nono Martinez Alonso: And yeah, maybe let's start with that.
Andy Payne: Sure.
Andy Payne: It's a good question.
Andy Payne: Although, like I said, my focus has mostly been on Grasshopper 1 development.
Andy Payne: So David Rutten is primarily in charge of the Grasshopper 2 development, which he started a number of years ago.
Andy Payne: And I think it was just a decision that he made, like I said, a couple of years ago, where he decided there were just certain limitations on how he built Grasshopper at the beginning that were preventing it from moving forward in a way that he wanted it to move forward.
Andy Payne: One of those things being multi-threaded.
Andy Payne: So Grasshopper 2 is a ground up rewrite of Grasshopper.
Andy Payne: And what I mean by that is all the way down to the fundamental level of how the graph is created, how components get computed, things like that.
Andy Payne: And there were certain limitations on how it was structured at the beginning of Grasshopper 1 that were gonna prevent that.
Andy Payne: So a ground up was sort of needed to make it more performant and faster in certain cases.
Andy Payne: And so I think he also wanted to explore newer ideas that maybe weren't gonna be available or compatible with Grasshopper 1 at the time.
Andy Payne: I think it was just a decision that he made that Grasshopper 1 was at a stable place that many people could use and are using in a lot of their projects.
Andy Payne: And so it was at a point where he could sort of stop development on Grasshopper 1 and sort of look at a new typology.
Andy Payne: And so I think that's where he started with that.
Andy Payne: And then what I've been focused on the last, say, year or two in Grasshopper 1 has been adding these new data types that haven't necessarily existed in Grasshopper.
Andy Payne: Grasshopper 1 has primarily been for geometry creation and manipulation.
Andy Payne: But now, and it hasn't really known anything about layers or blocks or hatches or line types, things like that, which exist in the Rhino environment, but not necessarily in Grasshopper.
Andy Payne: One of the things that myself and a colleague, Kike, have been working on has been to expose a lot of these data types in Grasshopper so that you can actually create these new workflows for Grasshopper that can allow you to stay in the Grasshopper platform longer, right?
Andy Payne: So instead of just using it for geometry creation and then you bake it and then you have to do all your documentation or whatever else in the Rhino environment, now you can actually construct all of these workflows directly in Grasshopper and even automate or parametrically create these workflows in the Grasshopper environment all the way through to the end, or at least that's the goal.
Nono Martinez Alonso: Yeah, I mean, that seems pretty cool.
Nono Martinez Alonso: That seems like I personally would have enjoyed that a lot when I was in architecture school, because it seemed like there's always the end documentation process or things that you have to do that, once you bake stuff out of Grasshopper and then you lay out things and start working on it.
Nono Martinez Alonso: It's kind of a pain to change a slider in Grasshopper, have everything recompute and not have that there.
Nono Martinez Alonso: I really, really like it.
Nono Martinez Alonso: I've seen some of this stuff, and I'm looking forward to using, having basically excuses to use it a bit more.
Andy Payne: I was just going to add a note on that.
Andy Payne: One of the newest features that were added, which I think is really to Kike, because Kike was the main driver behind this particular component, but was the content cache component.
Andy Payne: If you're familiar with Grasshopper and baking, every time you bake, it bakes a new copy into the document.
Andy Payne: And so like you said, if you want to make a change, you then have to delete what you were working on and add a new one.
Andy Payne: Well, with the content cache component, it's tracking the objects that you were actually updating, and will simply update the existing object instead of making a new copy of that object.
Andy Payne: And so the GUIDs stay the same, the object itself stays the same, it just updates with these new parameters.
Andy Payne: And so it really does simplify the whole workflow, I think, a lot and has a lot of potential.
Nono Martinez Alonso: Yeah, that's awesome.
Nono Martinez Alonso: I guess also the fact of breaking a bit from Grasshopper 1 to Grasshopper 2 has given David a lot of freedom, right?
Nono Martinez Alonso: To like, it's been rebuilt, it's multi-threaded, it's like everything's been reimagined in some way.
Nono Martinez Alonso: So I guess like a lot of components, things that he probably was thinking that should work some other way, he's just doing it from scratch in 2.0 instead of trying to fix the other one.
Andy Payne: Yeah, that's right.
Andy Payne: I mean, it's sort of, like I said, a ground up.
Andy Payne: And so he's written the whole graphics pipeline as much faster now.
Andy Payne: It really is, I think, a platform for him to explore these ideas that he's probably had for a while, but we're just constrained given the limitations of how Grasshopper 1 was necessarily set up at the time.
Andy Payne: And so he's now able to write it in such a way with sort of a new modern approach that lets it explore the concepts that he's been really wanting to explore for a while.
Nono Martinez Alonso: Has anything changed in the kind of like Rhino compute or cloud billing model, what we talked back then?
Nono Martinez Alonso: Or is it more or less like developing in the same direction?
Andy Payne: Rhino compute is still being, is actively being developed.
Andy Payne: It took a while for us to actually get Rhino compute switched for Rhino 8, because Rhino 8 is now built on .NET Core.
Andy Payne: So we had to make some changes so that Rhino compute would work, whereas in Rhino 7 and earlier, it was .NET Framework.
Andy Payne: And so there was a little bit of development that had to happen in order to be compatible for Rhino 8.
Andy Payne: But it's still an active project.
Andy Payne: I'd say it's still fairly in the same ballpark as where it was in general.
Andy Payne: We have updated the Hops component and the plugin development.
Andy Payne: But in general, there's not any dramatically new changes.
Andy Payne: One of the things we are looking at adding, since I talked about these new features in Grasshopper 1, one of the things that we added is the ability to store attributes of an object, right?
Andy Payne: So before, a curve only knew that it was a curve, but it didn't know anything about the layer it was on or the line type that it was assigned to, and so on and so forth.
Andy Payne: Now, we have these things called model objects that you can bring in that essentially is the curve, has the curve geometry, but it also has all those attributes that knows what layer it's on.
Andy Payne: And every attribute, if you look at the object properties panel that is available there, is now available in Grasshopper.
Andy Payne: So one of the things we need to do still that we've worked on, but has not been released, but probably will soon, is the ability to pass those model objects through Rhino Compute.
Andy Payne: Because right now it's really still geometry driven, but we will then be able to pass through objects that have those attributes stored and will allow you to use those objects in any definition that you would normally, but use those through Rhino Compute.
Nono Martinez Alonso: Okay, and so there were on the chat, you mentioned also a few things, the figurines feature and the shout feature from Grasshopper 2 that you're not directly working on, but can you maybe share that to capture that a bit also as well?
Andy Payne: Sure, I mean, like I said, there's a lot of really interesting features that David has unveiled that, I'm not the expert or the pro to necessarily say, these are the features that, but some of the things that have caught my eye is this ability, there's a component called a shout, which lets you set a variable and some value, but then you can listen to that shout anywhere else within your document.
Andy Payne: But the interesting thing for me is that you can actually shout from other documents.
Andy Payne: So you can have a shout from file A, and then you're opening file B, and you wanna listen to a shout from file A, but you're in file B, if that makes sense.
Andy Payne: And then you can actually, he has a visualization of where the values are coming from.
Andy Payne: So you can actually see it's coming from this file, which is then linked to this file and so on and so forth.
Andy Payne: So there's some really interesting things that he's been doing there.
Andy Payne: He's very briefly started working on visual diffing.
Andy Payne: So document history kind of is an interesting concept that I know a lot of people have asked about in Grasshopper 1, but he started to explore that idea of how can you compare a previous version to a new version?
Andy Payne: What's changed?
Andy Payne: What is the metadata attached to those objects that change?
Andy Payne: Things like that.
Andy Payne: And then of course, let's see, what else did, some of the graphics that he's been experimenting with.
Andy Payne: Like I said, there's some really interesting figurines.
Andy Payne: Beyond just, I think he has cars.
Andy Payne: I don't know if trees are available yet, but I think it's been talked about trees, cars and people.
Andy Payne: But the interesting thing is this concept of a pen.
Andy Payne: A pen is this thing that you can attach to any number of objects that will modify all of the objects that you've attached it to.
Andy Payne: And so for example, you can have a pen that changes the season of something.
Andy Payne: And so if you change the season of the figurines, they change the clothes that they're wearing from spring to winter, or summer to winter.
Andy Payne: They'll have less clothes on.
Andy Payne: Or autumn, they'll be carrying umbrellas and things like that.
Andy Payne: You can also have pens that modify the style, the graphic style, whether you want it to be flat or rendered or of a specific color.
Andy Payne: So there's some really interesting things I think there that are new concepts that just didn't exist in Grasshopper 1, but I think have a lot of potential.
Nono Martinez Alonso: Yeah, that's pretty awesome.
Nono Martinez Alonso: I look forward to trying.
Nono Martinez Alonso: And where is this available?
Nono Martinez Alonso: So Grasshopper 2, is it available?
Andy Payne: Grasshopper 2 is available in the Package Manager.
Andy Payne: It's a plugin, so it's not built in to Rhino the way Grasshopper 1 is.
Andy Payne: You have to install it with the Package Manager.
Andy Payne: So if you're in Rhino, you would just launch the Package Manager, type in the Package Manager in the command line, and then you would search for Grasshopper 2 or G2 is sometimes how it's referred to.
Andy Payne: You may have to click on the checkbox at the bottom of the Package Manager that says include pre-releases because it's still sort of an alpha level of development.
Andy Payne: But once you click on that checkbox, it should show up in the Package Manager and you can install it.
Andy Payne: And then you launch it using, I think it's the G2 command.
Andy Payne: So just type G2 and it will launch Grasshopper 2.
Andy Payne: And then you can explore it the way you would Grasshopper 1.
Nono Martinez Alonso: Also available in Rhino for Mac?
Andy Payne: Yes.
Nono Martinez Alonso: Gonna try that.
Nono Martinez Alonso: Gonna try that today or tomorrow.
Andy Payne: Yeah.
Nono Martinez Alonso: So we talked a bit about Grasshopper and Rhino.
Nono Martinez Alonso: Before I let you go, what's changed for you?
Nono Martinez Alonso: I mean, seems like more or less the same, or are you kind of like...
Andy Payne: Well, things are good.
Andy Payne: Family is still good.
Andy Payne: We're still enjoying everything around us.
Andy Payne: Our lifestyle is good.
Andy Payne: So I can't complain there.
Andy Payne: The job is good.
Andy Payne: I'm still staying curious and enjoy the work that I do every day, and getting to interact with clients and customers is a real benefit.
Andy Payne: So honestly, I have no complaints as to what I'm doing.
Andy Payne: And yeah, so I think things are still pretty much the same part for the course.
Andy Payne: So I'm just enjoying life as it is.
Nono Martinez Alonso: I saw you in Barcelona, I think it was last year, right?
Andy Payne: Yeah, probably last year.
Andy Payne: That's right.
Nono Martinez Alonso: Have you been traveling a lot?
Nono Martinez Alonso: Have you been doing a lot of workshops?
Andy Payne: Not so much.
Andy Payne: We did a trip to London.
Andy Payne: There was a conference in London, and then another conference in Barcelona.
Andy Payne: And then we did Autodesk University in the fall in Las Vegas.
Andy Payne: So a couple of conferences here and there.
Andy Payne: But overall, travel schedule is fairly minimal.
Nono Martinez Alonso: And I'm curious, is there any other tool, like startup or any other competitor product?
Nono Martinez Alonso: Is there anything that you're paying attention to?
Nono Martinez Alonso: Anything that calls your attention that seems like they're doing cool stuff?
Andy Payne: So sure, there are some interesting implicit modeling software that I think is intriguing.
Andy Payne: There's one called Metafold, I believe, out of Canada.
Andy Payne: And nTopology are kind of interesting.
Andy Payne: Those are sort of in the line of Monolith and what it was doing 10 years ago.
Andy Payne: But they're taking it in these new directions.
Andy Payne: So I kind of am watching those.
Andy Payne: There's obviously a new modeling package called Plasticity, which is interesting.
Andy Payne: I don't know a ton about it.
Andy Payne: I've dabbled in it and watched a couple of videos, but it's a new modeling kernel and a modeling platform.
Andy Payne: So it'll be interesting to watch where that goes.
Andy Payne: And of course, Blender and how it works.
Andy Payne: So those are sort of on the horizon of things that I'm just kind of watching and keeping up with.
Andy Payne: Thank you for the invitation.