If you’re new to Grasshopper and you’re wondering which plugins are more useful then this post might help.
Browsing the website food4rhino.com you will find hundreds of plugins so it’s easy to get lost and give up or download and install whatever sounds interesting.
Let’s try and make a good selection in order to improve your workflow and avoid saturating Grasshopper interface with useless toolbars.
Paneling and tessellation
This is one of the most common workflows in Grasshopper and these are some fundamental plugins that *must* be in your components folder.
- PanelingTools, by Rajaa Issa
- LunchBox, by Nathan Miller
- Weaverbird, by Giulio Piacentino
Attractors
Another fundamental section for those who begin to play with Grasshopper.
The best way of working with attractors is to build your own interaction script: I’ve made a tutorial (in spanish) available on my YouTube channel.
- PanelingTools, by Rajaa Issa
Loops and iterations
Machine Learning
Discipline – Architecture
Pretending to create a comprehensive list of all the important and necessary plugins for architectural design with Grasshopper it’s stupid and ambitious.
These are just the inevitables.
- Facade Design
- PanelingTools, by Rajaa Issa
- LunchBox, by Nathan Miller
- Heteroptera, by Amin Bahrami
- Form-finding and optimization
- Kangaroo Physics, by Daniel Piker
- Karamba3D, by Karamba
- tOpos, by archiseb (only if you own a CUDA capable graphic card)
- Millipede, by Sawapan (discontinued but useful – download it from our cloud drive)
- Sustainability/Efficiency
- Ladybug Tools, by Mostapha Sadeghipour Roudsari
- Mesh modeling
- Weaverbird, by Giulio Piacentino
- Volvox, by CITA
- Ivy, by Andrei Nejur
- Optimization
- Opossum, by Thomas Wortmann
- Goldfish (download it from our cloud drive)
Discipline – Design
Same as Architecture, a list of all the relevant plugins would be endless so here are the most important.
- Generic 3D modeling
- Pufferfish, by ekimroyrp (Mike Pryor)
- Mesh modeling
- Patterns
- Parakeet, by Esmaeil
- Heteroptera, by Amin Bahrami
- Product
- Peacock, by Daniel González Abalde
- Form-finding and optimization
- Kangaroo Physics, by Daniel Piker
- tOpos, by archiseb (only if you own a CUDA capable graphic card)
- Millipede, by Sawapan (discontinued but useful – download it from our cloud drive)
- Fabrication
- Kuka|Prc, by Robots in Architecture
- Taco ABB, by Florian Frank
- HAL, by Thibault Schwartz
- OpenNest, by petras_vestartas
- Generation, by Antonio Turiello
Discipline – Art and Media
