The Port Townsend Web Developers (PTWD) monthly meeting is a great forum for getting together with techies that have a wide range of experience and interests.
On 1/15/25, I gave a presentation on Rhino3D/Grasshopper/Python. This combination is an amazing toolkit for building 3D designs for almost any purpose and can be integrated with external systems. My main interest is in developing algorithms to achieve design and engineering goals. By creating algorithms instead of just geometry, we can hopefully design products that adapt to changing inputs and project goals efficiently.
Something I especially like about this combination of tools is being able to use the development practices that I am familiar with in software development to generate 3D objects. In software we enjoy a number of development patterns that can be powerful to apply to other disciplines: code reuse, function based approaches, modularity, source control, etc…
Presentation Resources:
- Presentation Slides
- Presentation Grasshopper Project - This is the meat of the presentation. Start at the top of the file, enable sections of Grasshopper components and try out the examples.
Additional Resources:
- Rhino 3D
- Novedge 3rd Party Reseller - Rhino 8 for $875 as of 2/2/25
- Coursera: 3D Modeling in Rhinoceros with Python/Rhinoscript - This is the excellent (and free) class that I had mentioned during the presentation that explored python based generation of modular forms. During the presentation, I showed some vases that came from alorithms I wrote for the class projects:
