Announcing Platypus!

Thornton Tomasetti’s CORE studio is pleased to announce Platypus, a new plugin for Grasshopper. We are releasing an Alpha build of Platypus today, for evaluation by the Grasshopper community.

Platypus allows Grasshopper authors to stream geometry to the web in real time. It works like a chatroom for parametric geometry, and allows for on-the-fly 3D model mashups in the web browser. Multiple [Grasshopper] authors can stream geometry into a shared 3D environment on the web – a Platypus Session – and multiple viewers can join that session on 3dplatyp.us to interact with the 3D model. Platypus can be used to present parametric 3D models to a remote audience, to quickly collaborate with other Grasshopper users, or both!

You can down load the Grasshopper plugin at food4rhino, and visit 3dplatyp.us to view your geometry on the web. This first round of Alpha testing will run for two weeks, until April 24 2014, after which the Grasshopper components will not solve.

We are very interested in hearing feedback from the community while the project is still in the prototyping stages of development. Please use the comments on this discussion to ask questions, suggest ideas, report bugs, etc. We are planning on rolling out another public alpha release or two this Spring, depending on how this first one goes, in advance of our Technology Symposium and Hackathon in New York.

Check out our getting started video below, and enjoy!

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Ben Howes on April 21, 2014 at 8:40am

Thanks, Florian,

I'm pretty sure there's an issue for international users when a proxy server is involved. You are the third person to report an issue like this from China...

We'll have to do some digging to see if there is a workaround for this. I imagine it has to do with the way Platypus connects to our web servers in Grasshopper, and that it has little to do with the browser side of the application.

Thank you very much for the feedback - I'll let you know what I find once I have a chance to dig in.

Permalink Reply by Ben Howes on April 21, 2014 at 8:43am

Oh one more thing - make sure you have unblocked the .gha and .dlls files! That's the most common reason for that error we've seen so far.

Permalink Reply by Duncan W on May 2, 2014 at 2:49am

Oh my god, the video is so stunning. Makes me nervous with excitement just thinking what you could do with this. I actually just yelled out "what the …" when I saw this. As soon as I'll have a chance to try this out with someone I'll post feedback. But THANK YOU — this is fantastic.

Permalink Reply by bma on May 5, 2014 at 6:22am

Hi Ben,

I would like to try your plugin but it seems that I can't connect to the server. Any ideas?

Thanks for your help

BMA

Permalink Reply by Ben Howes on May 6, 2014 at 9:30pm

Hi bma, thanks for the report.

Are you behind a firewall? Or using a proxy server when you connect to the web? If not, could you give us some more info about your setup? I'd love to know more about these Grasshopper side connection issues ... we might need to dump some more details out into the error messages in our next release.

Anything you can give us would help - geographic location, internet connection details (firewall or no, proxy server or no, home school or office network), Rhino/GH/Windows versions, etc.

Permalink Reply by Luc Wilson on May 19, 2014 at 9:29am

I'm getting the same two errors.

New York City, office network, Rhino 5 SR8, GH 0.9.0075, Platypus Alpha 003, and Windows 7 Professional SR1 64-bit. I unblocked all the .gha and .dll files.

I'm going to follow up with our IT department and see if there is something on our end causing the error.

Thanks!

Permalink Reply by Serge Neuman on May 23, 2014 at 6:50am

As you are asking for information, here my case. I had the same issue. According to the IT guys the problem is the Port. By default, all the ports are blocked by the proxy we have at work. Only the common ones are opened. If needed, they open a specific port for a specific account but it is a lot of paperwork. Fortunately for me, we also have a network for guests. No more access to the intranet but full access to the internet! That has solved my issue.

Thanks for the tools. It's a nice one.

Permalink Reply by Luc Wilson on May 27, 2014 at 3:05pm

Thanks for the suggestion. I talked with IT and they opened up port 2358 on the domain and that fixed the problem.

Permalink Reply by Ben Howes on June 19, 2014 at 11:49am

Beautiful! There's a fix to try for everyone else behind a corporate firewall.

Port 2358 is what we use to send data back and forth between Grasshopper and the Platypus servers.

Permalink Reply by Diego Flores on October 13, 2014 at 12:38am

Im having the "could not connect to the platypus server" but ive already opened 2358 inbound and outbound in windows firewall. Im not using any proxy and i did clicked "unblock" on each of the four file's properties. Any other ideas?

Permalink Reply by phillip on May 23, 2014 at 6:07am

Hi Ben,

Platypus is great. Though I am having some speed problems. If I move Sliders in the Browser, my GH will change immediately, but the view takes up to 30 sec to update. I do have a fast internet connection though. What could be the problem?Best,

Phillip

Permalink Reply by Ben Howes on June 19, 2014 at 11:46am

Thanks Phillip,

but sorry to hear the update time is so slow. Have a look at the FAQ section at the bottom of this article for some general info. Internet connection speed and model size are the main factors that affect performance in my experience. If you can get a very simple model (a few mesh faces or lines) working quickly, the issue is likely model size. If not, it's probably your internet connection (or some other network bottleneck between you and our server). Hope that helps.