So, after a few weeks of R&D looking into BHoM (which deserves a post of it’s own) and writing tech reports (which I’d rather not talk about), I finally managed to get some time at work to look into Rhino.Compute. I’ve been wanting to have a look into Rhino.Compute for some time now, but just never got time between this and that…you know how it goes.

What is Rhino.Compute?

For those who don’t know what Rhino.Compute is, it is a REST API that allows you to create Rhino Geometry via a Rhino.Compute Server. That is, you can create Rhino Geometry and even read and write files via code and have the Rhino.Compute server doing all the heavy lifting. This is super exciting stuff from McNeel Group because you don’t need to Rhino on the device (sort of) and you could use this either as standalone desktop application or (and this is the more exciting part) on mobile devices, tablets or simply on the web.

How to get Started…

Getting started with Rhino.Compute was remarkable easy as there are a few video walkthroughs by Junichiro Horikawa which help a great deal, all you need to do is just follow along. Here are some of his videos to get you started should you be interested…

If you have not heard of Junichiro Horikawa before and you use Rhino/Grasshopper, Unity or just love people doing cool things, you should seriously check out this guys website and youtube channel as he has awesome content. He also has a book!

Here’s a simple demo…

Anyway, after a quickstart with Junichiro’s tutorials, I thought I’d combine the things I learnt in Unity and here was the result…

A very simple demo

This combines all the things I learnt from the quickstart videos, but of course all in C# and using Unity. This really didn’t take nearly as long as I thought… although, I will say that python does make your life a lot simpler, in C# you have to do a whole bit of additional work. NOTE: To say this is original though is wrong, Thornton Thomasetti did something very much like this dubbed RESTHopper at the AEC Hackathon. My goal for this was to do my own implementation.

What next…

My next steps are to revamp my Grasshopper VR project built with Unity now implementing Rhino.Compute instead of my oh-so-hacky way I was doing before. From there, I will chuck into Android and do some Grasshopper AR. I am also learning Web Design and this would be a cool thing to inject into a web page, maybe I will use AR.js to have web AR too. Ahhh, too many possibilities.

As always, I hope you found this useful and thanks for reading! 🙂

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