Complete Guide to Grasshopper

Navigate Rhino's four-view interface—perspective, top, front, right—and learn to customize toolbars and layers for efficient modeling. Master the Gumball manipulator for transforms, then build a stylized sphere-based chair with curved ribs, establishing the parametric modeling fundamentals you'll use throughout the course.

Master the Grasshopper interface: placing components from the menu ribbon, connecting wires between inputs and outputs, and reading node states (orange for empty, red for error). Explore data types including integers, numbers, points, and text, then recreate Alvar Aalto's Lumber Centennial Gallery roof by generating organic curves from controlled point manipulations.

Understand how Grasshopper organizes data into lists and trees—the core structure underlying every parametric definition. Work through practical exercises extracting, combining, and restructuring list items using components like List Item, Shift List, and Cull Pattern, building the data management skills that drive more complex designs in later lessons.

Apply merge, weave, and flatten components to combine data streams and control how geometry assembles. After exploring tree manipulation and branch operations, recreate a fragment of Santiago Calatrava's structure in Valencia, demonstrating how proper data organization enables complex geometric forms from simple inputs.

Use range and series components to generate number sequences, then apply mathematical functions to create adaptive facade patterns. Explore how domain remapping translates values between different scales, enabling designs where panel sizes, rotations, or densities respond to calculated parameters.

Explore Grasshopper's curve types: polylines, interpolated curves, and NURBS, learning how control points affect curvature. Install the TwinCurves plugin to generate curve pairs for more complex profiles. Then design a parametric light installation piece, applying curve operations to create elegant sculptural forms.

Design two skyscraper facades by dividing, lofting, and panelizing curved profiles. The first establishes core techniques, then we tackle Norman Foster's Gherkin tower, recreating its distinctive diagonal grid using the curve tools and panel distribution methods covered in previous lessons.

Introduce point attractors—geometry that influences nearby elements based on proximity. Calculate distances from facade panels to attractor points, then remap those values to control panel rotation or scale. The project: a skyscraper facade that responds to sun position, with panels angled to track solar movement throughout the day.

Expand attractors from points to curves, enabling influence that follows paths rather than single locations. Using curve attractors, model the Clarion Hotel and Congress Centre facade by Space Group Architects, where panel depths vary according to proximity to curved reference lines.

Recreate Studio Gang's Nature Boardwalk Pavilion in Chicago. Start with a lofted dome surface, then project a triangulated pattern using the Pufferfish plugin. Learn the orient component to map flat 2D elements onto curved 3D surfaces, handling the 'chicken net' distortion that occurs when flat patterns wrap onto doubly-curved geometry.

Model a hexagonal dome pavilion designed by University of Porto students. Using the Noon plugin's hexagon divide component, create a honeycomb pattern on a sphere-based surface. Apply attractor points to control opening sizes, then use Boolean splits to cut the openings. A lofted chimney shape and graph mapper add the final geometric variations.

Prepare your parametric model for fabrication and presentation. Unwrap curved surfaces into flat pieces using the orient component, arrange them on a grid layout, and add offset curves for glue tabs. Create text labels with the Text 3D component for assembly guidance, then generate exploded diagrams using normal vectors to communicate construction logic.