Rhino Grasshopper Plugins
Discover 90+ Grasshopper plugins we've used in our projects.
Click on any plugin to explore related example files and see how they enhance parametric design.
Examples
Crystallon
Crystallon is an open source project for creating lattice structures using Rhino and Grasshopper3D. Each tool is left as a cluster which can be opened and modified at will, in the spirit of open source. We hope the community will continue to develop and contribute to Crystallon through the use of the Grasshopper group and Github.
Firefly
Firefly offers a set of software tools dedicated to bridging the gap between Grasshopper (a free plug-in for Rhino) and micro-controllers like the Arduino. It allows near real-time data flow between the digital and physical worlds – enabling the possibility to explore virtual and physical prototypes with unprecedented fluidity.
Quelea
Agent-Based Modeling for Designers
+ A new paradigm for 3D modeling utilizing agents.
+ Assign forces and behaviors to systems of agents to create interactions.
+ Utilize any data to drive the system.
+ Easily debug your system by displaying individual force vectors.
+ High performance, parallel algorithms, spatial data-structures.
+ Write your own custom forces, no coding required.
+ Open source framework for others to build custom behaviors.
+ Boid forces: Cohese, Separate, Align, & View.
+ Contain Agents within Brep, Box, Surface, and Polysurface environments.
+ Forces: Path Follow, Attract, Contain, Surface Flow, Seek, Arrive, Avoid Obstacle, Avoid Unaligned Collision, Sense Image, Sense Point, & more to come.
+ Behaviors: Bounce Contain, Kill Contain, Initial Velocity, Eat, Set Velocity, & more to come.
Physarealm
Physarum polycephalum, literally the “many-headed slime”, is a slime mold that inhabits shady, cool, moist areas, such as decaying leaves and logs. P. polycephalum is one of the easiest eukaryotic microbes to grow in culture, and has been used as a model organism for many studies involving amoeboid movement and cell motility. For example, a team of Japanese and Hungarian researchers have shown P. polycephalum can solve the Shortest path problem. When grown in a maze with oatmeal at two spots, P. polycephalum retracts from everywhere in the maze, except the shortest route connecting the two food sources.
Stripper
This toolkit focuses on the versatile nature of meshes, providing various effective functionalities for working with and editing mesh topology. Heavily inspired and driven by the concept of edge loops (thank you, Autodesk Maya and Pixologic ZBrush), the organizational data structure behind mesh construction provides a plethora of design possibilities, some of which are still being discovered today.
Gelatinous Cube
Gelatinous Cube is a set of discrete spatial modelling tools for Grasshopper. What does that mean? It takes a ‘space’ either a rectangle (‘pixel space‘) or bounding box (‘voxel space‘) and allows these pixels/voxels to be given values. These pixels/voxels are given values via Charges (Section 1 of the Gelatinous Cube Sub-Category) and rendered out via a series of predefined algorithms (e.g. Marching Squares/Cubes).
Wombat
Wombat for GH is an open source series of miscellaneous utilities aimed at improving modeling processes by streamlining common tasks. It includes components for operating on geometry, lists, files and folders, and visualizing the geometric properties of surfaces and meshes. Originally developed by Andrew Heumann and Brian Ringley while members of the Woods Bagot Design Technology team, maintained by WB DT. Open source at https://github.com/woodsbagot/WombatGH
Flexhopper
FlexHopper offers very fast, particle-based physics simulation within Grasshopper. It let’s you simulate unconstraint particles, fluids, rigid and soft bodies, textile and spring system, inflatables and a combination of all these materials in one scene at unparalleled speed. You can add collision geometry, define custom constraints and emit new particles during runtime.
TREESLOTH
As a 3D CAD software suite, Rhino+Grasshopper is, at its core, a means to create, transform and manage data. Grasshopper’s explicit visual scripting interface structures these operations through the use of DataTrees. Treesloth emerged as a series of tools applied in both professional and research practice to help better negotiate the the types of data relationships within (and between) Grasshopper definitions that enable more complex operations.
Boid
The BOID library operates exclusively with Agent locations (Grasshopper points) and Agent motion vectors (Grasshopper vectors). Each component calculates specific motion vector based on certain Agent behavior. The vectors need to be aggregated into a compound vector and iteratively applied insode an Anemone loop.
ShapeMap
ShapeMap is a plugin for Grasshopper, developed by the McNeel Asia China team. It integrates multiple basic functions in Rhino and has undergone secondary development. This plugin allows users to map any curve texture designed on a plane onto the surfaces of complex 3D models, while minimizing or eliminating deformation of the texture curves on the 3D surfaces. With ShapeMap, designing textures on 3D model surfaces becomes much easier, and the operation process is intuitive and simple.
Bullant GH
BullAnt is a Rhino3d/Grasshopper plug-in primarily for Architects and Engineers (but also other Rhino/Grasshopper users) featuring computational design tools to enhance and extend Rhino/Grasshopper. BullAnt features commands including mesh relaxation (minimal surfaces), mesh inflation (ETFE cushions), symmetry automation, tessellation (polygon packing), geodesic domes and curve network processing. Much of the structural sketching functionality is now deprecated and available in ggRhinoIFC plugin.
