my ideas for future features

hi!

after the response to this thread , i decided to make a thread with only my ideas. everyone is welcome to comment on them, but if you have your own ideas, please don't post them here, but make a separate thread in respect to Davids request.

1st idea: receivers for everyone! (the crowd goes wild)
i'm thinking, why not make each input hook be able to work as a receiver. it could be chosen from the right-click menu, and the waves graphic can appear (as in the receiver component) around that hook.

an advantage of this would be, that if you start with a bunch of components near the input components area, and then decide to make room in between this two sets for a new set, it is useful to get rid of the current connection lines that would make that area messy. it would be easier to just change the status of the hooks, rather then create a receiver for each input data needed, and redraw the connections.

2nd idea: preview selected only button
near the "preview mode" button, there could be an on-off "preview selected" button,that when is pushed, only displays the component(s) that is/are selected

it happens often that i am working in one part of the definition, that generates a certain geometry and i need to see how this geometry relates to other stuff in the scene, so i need other components visible, but i also need just to check if the resulted geo looks right, and it's hard to see with other objects overlapping in the display. i currently do this: bake the current component, and then close grasshopper, or chose no preview, then switch back to shaded preview. that button would make things easier.

thanks for the interest!
awaiting some feedback

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Andrei Raducanu on January 20, 2012 at 6:30pm

UPDATE since release 0.8.0064: this is now resolved by the Entwine component

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Permalink Reply by Andrei Raducanu on December 14, 2011 at 7:10am

24th idea: add number of items input to Point CP component

the component should ask you the closest now many points you want, and the hook should be set to 1 by default

say you want the 5 closest points, you input 5, and you get them, no more sort list etc...

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Permalink Reply by David Rutten on December 17, 2011 at 6:46am

Done.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Poprad, Slovakia

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Permalink Reply by Andrei Raducanu on December 17, 2011 at 1:38pm

goodies! :)

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Permalink Reply by Andrei Raducanu on January 20, 2012 at 6:28pm

not to be picky, but i think the Closeses PointS component would be enough if it's default value would be 1 (just to tidy things up a bit more)

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Permalink Reply by Andrei Raducanu on December 14, 2011 at 1:50pm

25th idea: wire visibility registered in the wire, not in the hook

when one uses wires, it's usually because the component that is needed for input is quite far in the definition. it can be the case that that information needs to go into another component, and you move the wire accordingly, but the visibility remains in the hook so you have to change the wire visibility on two hooks.

26th idea: set wire visibility to Hidden when holding alt and dragging the wire

pretty self-explanatory.. (works with the idea above)

27th idea: radio waves on output hooks that have hidden wires linked

it's nice to know when you see a component that has one output hook with apparently nothing linked to it, if that's really the case or it there's a hidden wire linked to it (this again works together with the idea 25th idea)

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Permalink Reply by Andrei Raducanu on January 9, 2012 at 10:21am

28th idea: when "preview selected only" is activated, show the selected geometry regardless of the preview status of the component

i usually use this preview mode when i try to find specific elements in the definition, usually when something doesn't work right. Sometimes the "suspects" have the preview disabled and i would like to skip the step where i have to enable the preview of the component in order to see the geometry when preview selected only is activated.

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Permalink Reply by Andrei Raducanu on January 21, 2012 at 5:43am

29th idea: component to extract the lowest/highest n numbers of a list

inputs:

list

no of items to extract

outputs:

lowest items

(+ lowest items indexes)

highest items

(+ highest items indexes)

would be easier then using the sort list + sublist, what i usually o

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Permalink Reply by Andrei Raducanu on November 19, 2012 at 2:30pm

30th idea : cast shadows on solids

there is the Mesh Shadow component, which is great, but it would be so much greater if it would be possible to cast the shadow on more complex shapes than a plane (breps would be ideal, but meshes would be cool as well). I might be asking for a lot, i don't know how complex this would be..)

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Permalink Reply by Andrei Raducanu on November 19, 2012 at 2:36pm

31st idea: separatrix

A separatrix is the line that divides the lit and dark areas of a shaded solid and i think it would be useful if a component could return this.
Ideally the light source could either be a vector (for paralell rays) or a point.