a machine that is light and very sturdy. I have taken my Macbook Pro all around the world, carry it with me every day, even dropped it a few times and its still totally fine. Its thin and light.
2) You get some actual support for your hardware even a few years down the line. My Macbook Pro is from 2012 and I can still walk in to any Apple Store and get help with it, which I have done many, many times in different places around the world - I never had to show a receipt or was charged any money for help. There is no PC/Laptop manufacturer in the world with anything close to that, because companies like Asus, Dell, etc. bring out dozens of new versions of laptops every year, so its much harder to service them after a few years.
3) This is the most important one, which usually people forget when they say that Macbooks are overpriced: Resale Value. If you have ever tried to sell an old PC/Laptop (I have a few times), you will know how little value they have even after just 2-3 years. Macbooks retain their value very well and even after 4 years you can still get 50% of your original price.
4) Of course you can install Windows on it and it runs perfectly. I have MacOS and Windows on it and both run absolutely fine. On the Windows side I have Rhino+GH, Maya and a few others. Having Windows is good, because some software still only runs on Windows (looking at you, 3DSMax!). Most other software also runs on MacOS. In the interest of sanity it is great to have an alternative to Windows for all the day to day stuff, like Mail, Calender, Photos, Presentations, etc. that just always works.
5) As for performance: Yes, Macbook Pros dont necessarily have the latest and greatest in graphics cards (the rest is on par with PC laptops), but unless you want to play games you will not need it. VRay RT can do GPU rendering, but you wont get great performance from a Notebook GPU anyways and it doesnt make sense to do rendering on a laptop (especially since you have a workstation). You could get one of the older Macbook Pro Retina Late 2013 or Mid 2014 models with the GTX750M by Nvidia, which will be usable to render using VRay RT, but of course not huge performance. Better to invest in a good used graphics card for your workstation like an Nvdia GTX980ti, which is the best value for money for GPU rendering right now (lots of used ones available).
So at least consider also getting a Macbook Pro. You can buy refurbished models (depending where you are) and they are like new, but a lot cheaper or even get an older one thats used. It will be a worthwile investment.
Take it from someone who has used dozens of PCs and Macs in my lifetime and have to do the IT support here at work (where we also use both).
I still have my Macbook Pro Retina from 2012 and its still running perfectly, super fast, and I can use Rhino and GH for huge files, do GPU Rendering with Octane Render and all sorts of other heavy computing stuff.
Hope that helps.…
Added by Armin Seltz at 11:12am on September 19, 2016
t the maximum potential with the bridge BIM+PARAMETRIC DESIGN ;D
During this Intense Week, we will learn about the power of Rhino + Grasshopper + ArchiCAD with Professional and Useful examples for our Normal Working day :D
You will get Advanced Library Files + Personal Web + Knowledge and Skills to start using this incredible Methodology ;D
Also, the week is having Lectures from different Experts sharing their Computational Working Experiences ;D And Jam Sessions! opening the door to 5 interesting topics to research, learn and experiment together :D
2020 is your YEAR ;D !!!
Complete details and registration……
arq, que se celebrará entre el 28 de Enero y el 1 de Febrero de 2013 en el Colegio de Arquitectos de Granada.
El taller está destinado a arquitectos, artistas y diseñadores, tanto como profesionales, como estudiantes de grado y posgrado, que, sin necesidad de haber tenido ningún contacto previo con entornos de programación o herramientas informáticas de dibujo paramétrico o generativo, están interesados en probar y experimentar con las opciones que nos pueden ofrecer a los diseñadores.
El taller está dividido en tres bloques:
Curso intensivo: del 28 de Enero al 30 de Febrero, en horario de mañana, de 10 a 14. Taller de proyectos: del 28 de Enero al 30 de Febrero, por la tarde, de 16 a 20; y el 31 de Febrero, durante todo el día.
Presentaciones: viernes 1 de Febrero, mañana y tarde.
Utilizaremos Grasshopper, el editor algorítmico asociado al software de modelado tridimensional y dibujo Rhinoceros, por su facilidad de aprendizaje, al tratarse de un entorno gráfico, facilidad de adquisición, al ser gratuito y haber disponible una versión de prueba de Rhinoceros también gratuita, y amplia difusión en los últimos años. Y lo emplearemos tanto como modelador, como conector entre otros softwares y varias disciplinas. Por este motivo, también utilizaremos algunos de sus plug-ins, como Geco, para análisis ambiental, Elk, para enlazarlo con OpenStreetMap o Kangaroo, para simulación de sistemas físicos.
Lo único que necesitas es un ordenador portátil (si no pudieras conseguir), hacer el ingreso con el importe correspondiente y mandarnos tus datos y el recibo bancario del ingreso a smartlabgranada@gmail.com. Puedes ver los detalles en el apartado de Inscripción. El resto del material, tanto software como hardware, lo ponemos nosotros.
Nuestro acercamiento a estas herramientas es entusiasta acerca del potencial creativo que pueden ofrecer a diseñadores y artistas, pero también crítico y especulativo. Nos alejamos tanto de una posición puramente formalista, como del estricto funcionalismo, a los que desde los últimos años frecuentemente se ha asociado a esta disciplina.…
Added by Miguel Vidal at 8:42am on January 19, 2013
the end of the workshop Student performance objectives
- Understanding some basic concepts of Grasshopper, such as; Mathematical Function, Geometry, etc.
- Creating a simple parametric design system.
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Schedule :
Deadline for Registration : April 02,2013
Workshop Starts : Thursday, April 02, 2013 - 5:30 pm
The workshop consists of 10 lectures, Each lecture lasts for 3 hours.
3 lectures per week
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Fees :
600 L.E
You have to fill the Registration Form below for place reservation.We only have few places available.
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Prerequisite :
-Basic knowledge of any 3d modeling software “Sketchup, 3dsmax, Rhino, Maya, ...,etc.” is required to attend the workshop.
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Registration Form:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1W5CptB7FyU2d37_aqtSaBN_sxPqj7491HUN_NFgGyg8/viewform
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Previous workshop
https://www.facebook.com/events/469048376477647/
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.548388031851299.1073741826.470747186282051&type=1
https://www.facebook.com/events/178326265647678/…
e:
Modulo 1Il workshop è finalizzato a fornire ai partecipanti i fondamenti della modellazione parametrica e generativa attraverso Grasshopper, plug-in di programmazione visuale per Rhinoceros 3D (uno dei più diffusi modellatori NURBS per l‘architettura e il design). Il workshop mira a gestire e sviluppare il rapporto tra informazione e geometria lavorando sui sistemi di involucro in condizioni specifiche. La discretizzazione di superfici (pannellizazione sia Nurbs che Mesh), la modellazione delle geometrie attraverso informazioni (siano esse provenienti da dati di analisi ambientali, da mappe di colore o da database), l’estrazione e la gestione di informazioni richiedono la comprensione delle strutture dei dati al fine di definire un processo che va dalla progettazione alla costruzione.I partecipanti impareranno come costruire e sviluppare strutture di dati parametrici per informare geometrie ‘data-driven’ e come estrarre le informazioni rilevanti da tali modelli per il processo di costruzione.Modulo 2Il workshop, volto a promuovere le nuove tecnologie digitali di supporto alla progettazione e alla fabbricazione, fornirà ai partecipanti gli strumenti per la preparazione, attraverso Grasshopper, dei modelli per il processo di stampa 3d. Il workshop inoltre, darà ai partecipanti i fondamenti dell’uso della stampante 3d e si concluderà con la fabbricazione del proprio modello realizzato durante il corso.
[.] Date:Modulo 1 – 25/26/27 Luglio 2014 – SiracusaModulo 2 – 28/29 Luglio 2014 – Catania
[.] Tutors:Arch. Andrea Graziano (Co-de-iT)Arch. Salvo Pappalardo (Studio Aion)Arch. David Montenegro (Hackspace_Catania)
[.] Luogo:Modulo 1Officina Ermocrate – Viale Ermocrate 7, 96100 – SiracusaModulo 2Hackspace_Catania – Via Grotte Bianche, 112 – Catania
[more info]
…
and enhancing its intrinsic qualities.
The program of the workshop consists of an intense exploration of Günther Domenig’s Steinhaus (situated at Ossiachersee in Carinthia, Austria) and it’s visible and hidden properties. By the use of mapping strategies these properties can be isolated and will be implemented as a temporary installation.
Each participant will investigate certain spatial aspects using methods of mapping.
In a series of tutorials on various techniques, strategies will be developed to translate and structure the collected information into a unified spatial concept. Participants will work amongst groups to propose the result of their investigations with a site specific installation which will be digitally materialized on site.
Complementary program:
lecture by Stefan Rutzinger & Kristina Schinegger, soma
guided tour and lecture about Steinhaus and Günther Domenig by Christian Halm
presentation by Clemens Preisinger, karamba
Closing event and presentation
250€ early bird registration (until June 14th) | 300€ (until June 28)
More information at www.semf.cc
Email us at info@SeMF.cc…
with this machine.
As Jason says, Rhino and Grasshopper are mainly single-threaded, so I prioritized single core speed and got an i7 4790k, which comfortably overclocks to 4.7GHz (with a decent air cooler, but no fancy liquid cooling).
The Kangaroo2 solver is actually multi-threaded now, but the difference this makes is not great as you might imagine. Using 4 cores is certainly nowhere near 4 times faster, because although parts of the calculation are easily parallelized, everything still needs to be recombined at each iteration, and this is usually the bottleneck. I think there is still room for some improvement in how it is multi-threaded, but I wouldn't hold your breath for any massive changes on this front soon.
I'd be interested to know how the performance scales with the Xeon chips (more cores, significantly more expensive, but relatively low clock speeds). At the time I made the guess that they weren't worth it, but it would be good to really test this out.
RAM is relatively cheap these days, so I went with 32GB of it at 2133MHz. It does seem that the speed of the RAM matters, as enabling XMP in the BIOS (to make it run above the default 1333) seemed to make a noticeable difference.
Graphics-wise my personal feeling is that the gaming oriented GTX cards offer better value than the much more expensive 'professional' Quadro range - and have read that the hardware between the 2 has historically been very similar or even identical despite the Quadros being several times the price, with the difference being mainly in the drivers. There are some threads on discourse.mcneel.com about this, and it seems that recent GTX cards like the 970 do very well in Holomark (the Rhino performance benchmarking tool).
I got a GTX 770 (this was just before the 900 series came out), which is probably way overkill just for Rhino/Grasshopper, as they don't use the GPU for more than display (Though some of the render plugins do, and I think for those more CUDA cores is what matters, so there GTX is probably still better value.)
Probably swapping this for a much cheaper card wouldn't make much difference to Rhino/GH performance anyway (though if you want to use the PC for other stuff like gaming or virtual reality it does).
I don't have much experience with AMD cards, so can't comment on how they compare to Nvidia.
Eventually I do hope to make Kangaroo run the physics on the GPU, and potentially this does have a big speed impact. Nvidia recently released some impressive demos of their FLEX engine, which really fly with a decent graphics card. That is very much game-physics, and not suitable for most of the things Kangaroo is used for, but theoretically Kangaroo could also be adapted to use CUDA (or OpenCL), though it involves a lot of big changes, and I don't have a timeline for this yet.
In the much shorter term there are some things in the pipeline that should speed up Kangaroo for certain things like collisions between large numbers of objects, just by using some different algorithms.
Altogether my machine was still well under €2K, and I've been really happy with it. That said, the difference in performance between this and my 4 year old €700 i5 laptop is actually not that huge in day-to-day Grasshopper usage. It does seem that there is a strong case of diminishing returns with buying a PC - I'd hazard a guess that even spending 3 times this amount (as another thread on this forum was discussing recently) you'd be hard pushed to get anything that made a really significant difference to the experience of using it, and if you really want to spend more money, you would be better off just upgrading more frequently (and getting a nice monitor(s)).
Anyway, a long ramble, I hope some of it is useful. As I said, I'm no hardware expert, and would be interested to hear different opinions.
I also think it will be nice to make a simple benchmarking tool for Kangaroo and have people run it on their various machines and report back results (as with Holomark), to help others make informed decisions on these things. I'll try and put something together for this soon.
…
lysing and assessing sustainable performance of buildings and structures, called sustainability-open. Yes, open-source: that means everybody can use it as much as they want. We hope that this will give designers and engineers to make more sustainable buildings and structures in the future. And you can take a look at our code - to learn or improve it if you like! The framework is still in early stage and doesn't do a lot yet at the moment, so this is your chance to become an early-adopter.(By the way, very soon new components will come out that will early let you do more.)
The framework is linked to Grasshopper and Rhino - as soon as we have a little bit more, we will add some links on this site too.
At the Design Modelling Symposium Berlin (September 28 - October 3)we will host a workshop over the weekend which will show you everything about the framework and its components, our future plans, etc. We will also teach you how to develop your own components. Not everything will be purely related to the framework as we will be doing a lot of .net development related to Rhino/Grasshopper and other parametric applications. If you would like to know more about the framework, take a look at: http://www.sustainability-open.com or follow us on Twitter: @sustainableopenIf you would like to sign up for the workshop in Berlin or would like to know more, go here:https://www.design-modelling-symposium.de/frontend/index.php?folder...Regards,Jeroen…
lysing and assessing sustainable performance of buildings and structures, called sustainability-open. Yes, open-source: that means everybody can use it as much as they want. We hope that this will give designers and engineers to make more sustainable buildings and structures in the future. And you can take a look at our code - to learn or improve it if you like! The framework is still in early stage and doesn't do a lot yet at the moment, so this is your chance to become an early-adopter.(By the way, very soon new components will come out that will early let you do more.)
The framework is linked to Grasshopper and Rhino - as soon as we have a little bit more, we will add some links on this site too.
At the Design Modelling Symposium Berlin (September 28 - October 3)we will host a workshop over the weekend which will show you everything about the framework and its components, our future plans, etc. We will also teach you how to develop your own components. Not everything will be purely related to the framework as we will be doing a lot of .net development related to Rhino/Grasshopper and other parametric applications. If you would like to know more about the framework, take a look at: http://www.sustainability-open.com or follow us on Twitter: @sustainableopenIf you would like to sign up for the workshop in Berlin or would like to know more, go here:https://www.design-modelling-symposium.de/frontend/index.php?folder_id=180Regards,Jeroen…
register, please contact Miss Roula Homsi Tel: 06/218400 ext:4007email: r.homsi@bau.edu.lbTOPICS: Parametric design , Algorithms, Kinetic Architecture, responsive facades, interactive design, smart buildings, generative design, NURBS modeling, parametric modeling, architectural design algorithms, form finding algorithms , and Environmental Adaptive Dynamic ArchitectureComputational skills: Rhino3D – Grasshopper 3d – Paneling tools - Kangaroo plugin - fields grasshopper -Digital Fabrication- Arduino micro controllers - lighting and temperature sensors - Firefly plugin - gHowl – mobile controller - Wi-Fi controllersWORKSHOP PROGRAM: PHASE ONE: Day 01- opening lecture on Algorithmic Added Design - tutorials and introductions to NURBS modeling with Rhino 3d- Parametric modeling tutorials with grasshopper 3d- Grasshopper processes, algorithmic logic and data management-Essential mathematical functions and logical operations- Projects assignments, groups divisions, project phase’s scheduleDay 02 - Form finding methods and theories for architecture - Training on physical algorithms using Kangaroo plugin-Catenary systems on curves, Catenary on surfaces, and mesh relaxation- Algorithms and design inspirations- Subdivision algorithms, paneling tools- Responsive materials, structural optimizations- Project phase one submissionDay 03- Envelope pattern optimizations for natural lighting- Kinetic Architecture introduction and projects examples- Responsive material analysis and design systems- Kinetic facades and dynamic pattern - Training on Arduino & preparing digital models for kinetic simulationPHASE TWODay 04- environmental Sensors, design reaction- lighting sensors, temperature sensors-Responsive envelop responsive simulations to sensors.-Smart and embedded systems for Architecture- Architectural models movements and mechanisms Day 05- Wireless controllers for grasshopper- Mobile controllers - Projects final submissionDay 06 -Finalizing students projects,-Models fabrications and sensors installations, documenting reactions-Final project ourcomesFEES for the 2 phases __ fees is 420 $ per participants( 360 for BAU students) Fees includes all teaching materials, software kit, lectures kit, laser cutting, Arduino microcontroller boards, sensors and using equipment. Students need to bring their own laptops, digital equipment and model making tools.PREREQUESTSThis program is open to current international Engineering, architecture and design students, masters, PhD candidates and young architects and professionals. Software Requirements: basic knowledge of 2D and 3D modeling software.…