Scripting Custom Components for Grasshopper3d in C# .NET on RhinoCommon

Introduction to expanding out-of-the-box parametric cad applications to project-specific toolsets.

What participants can expect to learn in this workshop?

This workshop targets architects, engineers and designers who want to algorithmically process geometric entities by means of own methods or functions. It is an introductory workshop on the borderline where the architecture-engineering-construction-branch meets the basics of programming.

Participants will learn concepts of object oriented programming and essential syntax of C# to endeavour into personally extending parametric toolsets. The workshop will focus on introducing the .NET language C# and the Software Development Kit (SDK) RhinoCommon to the participants.

Throughout the workshop we will switch between step-by-step explained code samples, compact summaries of underlying concepts and simple but effective geometry generation and manipulation tasks. By the end of the workshop participants will have learnt the essentials to write, debug and compile Custom Components for Grasshopper utilizing both own code as well as available libraries.

Topics

- use of Script Component within Grasshopper

- explanation to the .NET Framework

- introduction to RhinoCommon SDK

- fundamentals of imperative / object-oriented programming (OOP)

- data types, operators, properties

- variables, arrays, lists, enumerations

- methods

- objects, classes

- control structures: conditional statements (if, else, switch)

- control structures: loops (for, foreach, while, do)

- walk-through iterative und recursive code-samples

- use of RhinoCommon Geometry class library: creation, sorting, editing of Geometry (Points, Vectors, Curves, Surfaces)

- adding (baking) geometry to the active Rhino 3DM Document, including attributes (Name, Layer, Colors etc...)

- introduction to the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) MS Visual Studio Express Edition

- compiling code to dll/gha files (plug-ins) / making your own Grasshopper custom components

Requirements for participants

Participants bring their own laptop with Rhino 5.0 32-bit edition (commercial, student or trial version), Grasshopper3d latest build - currently 0.9.0056 (free), and Microsoft Visual C# 2010 Express or Version 2012 (free) pre-installed on an Operating System with .NET Framework 4.0.

Language: English

Link to conference homepage:

http://cf2013.tongji-caup.org

Link to workshops at conference:

http://cf2013.tongji-caup.org/?call=Workshop