Introduction to Grasshopper

Hello, I'm Lauren. After some number of years in the workforce, I have launched Cactus Rain and am going back to Uni for an MArch. I want to be able to design and fabricate for materials for regenerative buildings. My mind works parametrically, so Grasshopper3D for Rhinoceros will be a good tool to codify my thinking! It also provides a community to share ideas and inspiration.

This origami-inspired sculptural tree from Algorithms Aided Design by Arturo Tedeschi used Grasshopper to populate the double-curved geometry of hyperbolic paraboloids, then divided the resulting surfaces into sets to get mirroring components. "To control the size of the panels, we changed the density of the division and used a custom “graph mapper” tool which projects values from the x axis to the y axis using a user-defined curve. This is how the gradient from small to large and from flat to folded was created." -SimplyRhino.co.uk

Could be very interesting as a rain catcher!


This Eco-resort design for New Mexico by Stephen Melville, Harri Lewis and Neil Clements of Ramboll RCD keeps out light in summer, but lets it in the winter. The repeating fins are optimized parametrically with sun angle data. 

So, a great passive solar strategy for our high desert, but could be adjusted for other sizes or locations!

"Recursion is the process of repeating items in a self-similar way. For this project we moved and rotated vectors in space to form a roof that responds to sunlight and resembles a galaxy. One of the great aspects of Grasshopper3D is that you can link all kinds of tools and simulations to your parametric model directly. In this case, we linked the recursion to a sun angle that was imported to Grasshopper from Ecotect using the plugin Geco by Thomas Grabner and Ursula Frick. This allowed the roof to grow while making sure that sunlight stays out during summer and gets in during winter." -SimplyRhino.co.uk

Modeling the Vessel from Art Ludwig's "Water Storage" Book Cover