Stupendous news—McNeel releases beta Grasshopper for Mac

Robert McNeel & Associates, the developer of the highly regarded and extremely popular Rhino for 3D modeling and design, has announced a new Rhino Mac WIP (work in progress) that includes the first release for use of a WIP version of Grasshopper for Mac.

Huge Demand for Grasshopper on Mac

The big news comes sans press release of any kind and is entirely typical of the software developer with regards to its continuous WIP evolutions.

Grasshopper for Mac has been under development for sometime, as noted earlier on Architosh when the first official commercial release of Rhino for Mac was announced back last summer. Since September of 2015, those wanting a fully battle-tested, commercial worthy release of Rhino on Mac have been able to acquire it just like the Windows version of Rhino.

01 – This screenshot of my browser shows the Rhino thread wherein a mostly elated and thrilled set of users are happy to hear this surprising news about Grasshopper for the Mac.

Yet, with the news of Rhino for Mac, first official commercial release, came urgency and more pressure to not only establish feature parity with the Windows version but in particular for McNeel and & Associates to get to work on releasing Grasshopper for Rhino Mac too.

International Architectural Sensation: Rhino + Grasshopper

For those outside of the world of Architecture, it may come as news to them to learn that Rhino, a 3D modeler that had more roots in industrial and product design in the beginning, established itself as a cutting edge modeling and design tool in the world of Architecture several years ago.

Today Rhino is a default main design application in many of the world’s most cutting edge architecture practices worldwide. Firms like BIG in Copenhagen, for example, probably the most popular architecture practice in the world at this present time, use Rhino as their primary design tool.

Grasshopper gives Rhino a visual-scripting, node-based environment that enables algorithmic design and modeling operations so that designers can create rule-based and mathematically controlled 3D forms. Since these rules can be tied to building performance criteria and items like solar exposure or shadow, Rhino + Grasshopper have in some ways been heralding the future of Architecture wherein architects derive final designs less on intuition and experience and more on a mixture of those two ingredients plus computational methods that verify a building design’s actual performance capabilities—such as energy consumption.

Learning More

A link to the discussion forum is here but I do not recall if just anybody can access these boards (you may need to be a user/member).

Grasshopper for Mac WIP, is a part of the newest Rhino for Mac WIP which is available, I believe, only to paid commercial customers of Rhino for Mac. We will confirm these facts and post updates.