Collaboration in Grasshopper

Hi all,

Here at Flux we've noticed that there is an increasing desire to develop collaborative modes of working in Grasshopper, as a number of tools have cropped up that begin to hint at these new modes of working.   The good news is that this is a sign that Grasshopper is being embraced on larger projects and in larger teams, and tools are developing to try to overcome some of the challenges of working collaboratively... 

A few of the highlights that we know of:

SlingShot! - Nathan Miller's SQL database components for storing and sharing data between grasshopper definitions at the very least

gHowl - UDP connections for shuttling data back and forth

Elefront - For attaching intelligent key-value pairs to Rhino geometry that can save state when sharing geometry

Platypus - The new plugin from Thornton Tomasetti that allows you to interact with your geometry on the web, in real time, with collaborators

It was in this spirit that we released Leafcutter, a Google Sheets plugin that lets you use a web-based spreadsheet as a data source across different GH installations.  Google Sheets is the Google Docs answer to Excel, which has long been a useful tool in the Grasshopper arsenal.  With Google Sheets in the toolkit, however, you are now able to open your source/target files to open collaboration on a team.

For example, we were recently working on prototyping a space planning algorithm in Grasshopper, and we used Google sheets to drive the algorithm in a collaborative environment.  Here is a view of one of the early tests:

And our collaborative Google Sheets environment:

I have countless Grasshopper definitions that rely on Excel spreadsheets for some reason or another, and invariably I would run into the problem of a missing local file or spreadsheets that were out of sync with a collaborator.  Leafcutter is working quite nicely so far to make sure that everyone is on the same page (literally), and everyone has the most recent data.  We can use the spreadsheet as a collection point, as well, by writing new iterations to different sheet names, which can be referenced back to Grasshopper if necessary.  Finally, it also provides us a convenient interface to leave comments and discuss the issues at hand.  (Notice also that I am operating from a PC on one side and a Mac on the other.) 

If you are using Leafcutter, we'd love to see some more examples of collaboration that was made possible as a result, and of course we're hoping the community can take up the open source project to add features and cover use cases we haven't thought of yet.

Finally, we would love to see more features like this make their way into Grasshopper.  Do you know of some plug-ins that we've missed in this roundup?  Any other ideas for collaborative tools that would like to see happen?

Looking forward to your thoughts.

Marc Syp

Application Engineer

Flux Factory, Inc

San Francisco, CA