From the course: Grasshopper: Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

Heteroptera: Network tools

From the course: Grasshopper: Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

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Heteroptera: Network tools

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- Welcome. In this video we're going to look at the Heteroptera plugin for Grasshopper. As usual when you download from food4Rhino, you need to log in. We're going to be using version 0.5.2.6 and the installation process is standard. So you're going to put the downloaded GHA file into the components folder and just make sure that you unblock it before restarting Rhino and using the plugin. I have my exercise file open already here and in the file, I have a pattern and a box around it bounds. I would focus on one specific aspect of Heteroptera . There's a lot of functionality within the plugin. We're going to look at how it handles networks, because that's something that there are several plugins that deal with networks within Grasshopper, but Heteroptera does a really beautiful job of one, making it easy to convert geometry into a network, and then actually allowing you to edit and control the network within Grasshopper as you're working with the data. So let's look at how we create that network first. So I'm going to do network from lines. I'm going to plug in my pattern and actually let's get the sets, merge. And we're going to merge the pattern with the bounds, 'cause we wanted the bounds to be a part of the network. And the idea here is that this is simulating some sort of maybe a circulation pattern or optimization, and we're going to potentially build a landscape solution within this. So this is how people are moving through a space or something like that. Set the tolerance to .1, give a fairly loose tolerance and make sure there's no tiny lines or gaps or anything like that. So now we have our network generated. We're going to go back to Heteroptera. We're going to visualize the nodes within network. And this is the key difference between just a set of lines and a network. Each line is identified with its relationships to the nodes, and each node is identified with its relationship to other nodes. So each node is numbered, and then we can actually visualize and edit this network within Grasshopper using Heteroptera. So here, if you saw what I did there, I connected the point to point typology into this component, which is here within it's called a network editor, and then I double clicked. And now this is actually showing me a visualization of this physical, this geometry network, right within Grasshopper. And I can even edit within Grasshopper adding connections and removing connections. So now I'm going to connect this back to a new network component. So this will let me sort of output. So I plug it in, I edit it and then output it on the other side and let's put our lines in. So now we're visualizing our nodes and we're visualizing our lines on the other end. And if I wanted to remove a line, let's say, I want to remove 50 to 20. So I find 50 and 20 is up there. So I'll go 50, 20. And now that line is gone. If I want to put it back in, or I want to reset everything and just double click and they'll bring it back. So it gives you this powerful way of controlling the network right within your script. And that might not seem that valuable, but if you're dealing with a very complex network, that's three dimensional, a lot of overlapping lines. This gives you a relatively easy way to add and remove links within the network without worrying about, making sure the points are exactly perfectly aligned and all the issues that arise when you're doing that same modification within Rhino adjusting geometry. Then if we want to change patterns, we just need to rebuild. And then we see that other alternative circulation network, and you can actually see something interesting, it's very different looking at the network and this display versus this display. This is showing more, giving you a sense of how many connections per node. That's kind of the density within here. And we can see the node identification and the output edges. So in the next video, we're going to look at how we can use this network control to actually generate some geometry based on these edges.

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