Inflection Point: Disruptions, Platforms and Growth with Rhino + Grasshopper (Part 1)

Last summer when McNeel & Associates released a commercial version of Rhino 5 for the Mac, a lot of us in the CAD/3D industry were a bit surprised. You see, a WIP (work in progress) version has been in existence for well over five years. It seemed that the WIP might be eternal.

So what changed?

This line of inquiry stayed with me for months when I had the chance to visit the Seattle area for another reason (college hunting for my son). Making a trip over to McNeel & Associates seemed opportune.

Inflection Point? Really?

A commercial release of Rhino for the Mac doesn’t constitute an inflection point for the Seattle-headquartered software leader. But there is more. Things like the future of Grasshopper, the rise of algorithmic computation in the AEC industry, the rise of robots in various industrial sectors—including AEC—and changes in the landscape of software programming models all factor into why visiting McNeel & Associates at this time seemed so timely.

Sitting down with Dan Belcher and Scott Davidson, of McNeel & Associates, pre-college son in tow, we began a conversation that touched on all these points and more. With the rise of algorithmic computation in AEC in particular, I asked them how they felt about being innovators in this movement.

“We wouldn’t call ourselves ‘innovators’,” replies Scott Davidson, who has been with the company for many years. I asked him why not and he replied—”Because we don’t jump on the cutting edge. Yes, you can say that GH [Grasshopper] solves some unique problems but it is not because of some cutting edge technologies. We simply try to solve customers’ problems.”

McNeel (the firm’s full name is Robert McNeel & Associates) is a firm that has rather humble origins, beginning in the early days as an Autodesk dealer. But some might say they are being too humble about being innovators behind the present moment.

Coming of Age—The Visual Scripting Movement in AEC

The truth is McNeel’s Rhino modeling program and visual scripting plugin Grasshopper are arguably the leading actors in a paradigm shift well underway, but with a long way to go, affecting the entire future of the built world.

What makes the McNeel story perhaps more interesting is the vanguard and rebel like nature of both its technology and its orientation as a software firm. While its apps are the actor leads, the firm has had competition—and lately—increased and growing competition. Both Bentley, who was originally in this market early, and Autodesk have similar pairings between powerful parametric 3D modeling and visual, algorithmic scripting tools. And now there are other entrants, like the Nemetschek Group’s Vectorworks subsidiary.

Looking around globally some of the largest and most avant garde AE firms, places like BIG, Foster & Partners, Nikken Sekkei, Woods Bagot, and Thornton Tomassetti, all have had—often for over a decade—advanced computation groups; and in those groups Rhino and Grasshopper have served prominently at what those groups do. New companies like Flux.io have new web-based visual programming tools that mirror the node-based mode in Grasshopper now popularly seen within the labs at architecture schools around the world.

MORE: Focus: Visiting Nikken Sekkei and Discussing BIM and Graphisoft

Despite this, Scott Davidson wanted to ask, “Do you think this has changed?” when I referred to the idea that Rhino + Grasshopper have the highest mindshare in this sector. Even if it has or may change, it likely doesn’t matter in the grand scheme. McNeel’s Rhino may have started out predominantly in the non-AEC industry but today it remains, with Grasshopper, the phalanx in a toolset transformation that is reshaping AEC from architect to engineer to fabricator to erector.

“Yeah, it has certainly been interesting for us,” admits Davidson modestly about the strong growth the company has experienced in the AEC market. “It is a crazy big market when you add in all the contractors and the subs and Rhino plays well down there.”

“From a market point of view,” adds Davidson “it validates what you are doing…and you know what they say about competition: it’s always a good thing.”

A Global Footprint: Where is Rhino + Grasshopper?

McNeel’s offices are around the world but its main office is headquartered in the lovely Seattle neighborhood of Fremont, where both Google and Tableau have key offices. The architecture style of the famous Seattle Needle, known as “Googie” is also behind the McNeel office’s building, designed by NBBJ. The thin-shell parabolic arched structure is a delightful, though aging, structure the firm has found itself in for decades.

While the vast majority of its programming staff are in Seattle, McNeel has a major office in Barcelona, Spain. Additionally, key support and sales offices are around the world in many countries round with a global staff just under 70 people.

David Rutten, who is arguably “Mr. Grasshopper”—who created it by himself to solve problems that Rhinoscript could not do—works out of a remote Sound of Music landscape in beautiful Austria. While Rutten invented and single-handedly coded Grasshopper—which staff refer to as GH—these days he is not alone.

“We have more people helping him because it has gotten so big,” added Dan Belcher. “Translating for the Mac, for example…we needed more support that way and there are different people working on various components of GH all around the world. It’s still his baby,” continues Belcher, “but people are doing things that he doesn’t want to do anymore.”

With folks in Spain, Canada, Finland, Asia and other locations in the US, the McNeel footprint continues to expand in concert with its growing user base. And the relationship is unorthodox. “Almost everyone that has started with us over the past 10 years has started somewhere within the Rhino community,” says Belcher. “David was a Rhino community person.”

Programmatic Disruption: Grasshopper and its Future and Present

If Rhino and Grasshopper were a married couple, or Adam and Eve, Rhino would be the Mr and GH the Mrs. Admittedly, while one comes from the other, Grasshopper has a more beautiful user interface and is more evolved. When asked if the two programs would ever share the same look and feel, Davidson answered decisively.  “At this point I would say no. It is not important to the community.”

What is important to the community—and what is important to the community ends up having a big impact on what is important to McNeel the software firm—is the development of Grasshopper as a richer programming platform.

“One of the things that became clear with Grasshopper version 1,” says Belcher, “is that it is very much its own development platform. It has its own vernacular and its own language…but it is not an IDE [integrated development environment].” As part of the loftier goals with Grasshopper 2—which is currently in the early stages of development and will be released on both Mac and Windows simultaneously—Rutten wishes for it to be a full-fledged development platform. While it already has an integrated text editor, and while it supports VB, Python and C# (pronounced see-sharp), the goal is to take it much further and for a good reason.

“So one of the things that interest us about Grasshopper is how many ways can you access it?” Belcher adds. “We have a good amount of advanced programmers who want to access it from a variety of ways.”

next page: Grasshopper—Gateway Drug to Programming

Grasshopper—Gateway Drug to Programming

Back to the inflection point theory noted earlier…anybody aware of the coding movement pervading academia at the K-12 level, might not be surprised then to see the cultural alignment happening between movements like that and what is happening in the world of AEC.

While only members of advanced computational groups in some of the world’s elite AE firms have been champions of coding and scripting in the past, more and more schools of architecture are rushing this imperative to learn to code.

“We talk sometimes that the elephant in the room—that nobody wants to talk about—is that the design often takes on a life in relationship to the tools,” says Scott Davidson. “Nobody wants that to happen, so the ability to write your own tools, to fit your design, does allow a level of flexibility that you otherwise might not have.”

“I know the AA [Architectural Association] in London,” adds Davidson, “they have been trying to push this agenda—that you gotta know how to program, you gotta know how to script, you gotta know how to do these things…in order to solve your design problems.”

Not all people in architectural education are fans of the idea that architects must now know how to code or script…in order to make their own tools, in order that their firm’s designs don’t become shaped by the tools the way automobiles have become shaped by wind tunnel testing. Yet, that is potentially one result of where computation, parametrization, and optimization is going to steer architecture—towards commonness.

“What we have found,” says Davidson, “is if we take 30 people in a class and try to teach them to script by code, probably about five of them will get it…I mean really get it…out of the whole of the class. But, if you teach them with Grasshopper, all but three of the 30 will get it.”

With Grasshopper,” he continues, “people reach a much higher level of understanding of the concepts of scripting or coding.”

So the McNeel folks admit that Grasshopper has become a “gateway drug” of sort…a path to more advanced scripting or complete computer programming. Not only are more advanced programmers trying to do more to talk to Grasshopper…from all kinds of other apps, but those who evaded programming but pass through Grasshopper often end up maturing to the point where they become full computer programmers. This reality is shaping the future of Grasshopper 2.

The Platform Powers That Be—What Led to Mac?

Another factor affecting the future of Grasshopper and Rhino and, quite frankly, the future now of many tools in AEC, is the continued growth in preference for Apple’s Macs.

This is not a new discovery for the McNeel crew; the push for and potential interest in taking Rhino to the Mac platform percolated nearly ten years ago at the Seattle company. This fact was quite shocking to this author, who for years wondered if McNeel’s offices were potentially under the gravitational forces of nearby behemoth Microsoft, the fabled arch nemesis of Apple in the pre-devices era.

However, Davison and Belcher confide that it is the market and their community who they listen to…and these two things change over time. “See, this whole Mac thing is really interesting,” chimes in Davidson. “I don’t think anyone’s ever really cracked that.”

Asking him to explain what he means Davidson responds: “Architects have always really liked the Mac, but it seems that it has always had this kind of ceiling that it can’t break through. Whether it’s fabrication, or documentation…whether it is working with others—who knows what it is—but I think it is going to be interesting to watch [the market] as Grasshopper matures on the Mac side.”

Davidson is referring on some level to the way key tools actually have stymied the Mac’s ability to spread more vigorously across a terrain which has always been receptive. “At some point what happens when all these other plugins—for instance you can get the CNC machines going—where you can get all these third party tools…all working on the Mac?”

Davidson adds: “And the platform is flexible enough where you can start writing things…do we break out of that somewhat limiting thing where—you know—students love the Mac, small offices get work done on the Mac, but larger offices always seem to need the PC?”

These kinds of questions are lingering at McNeel who admit that the commercial version of Rhino for Mac has surprised them. Asked if they feared that the Mac version of Rhino would simply cannibalize Rhino on Windows, Davidson responded—”Oh yeah. Definitely.”

Yet Belcher responds and notes that the Mac is alive and well and it is generating its own customers. While the new Mac Rhino customers come from all sectors, including AEC, a good bulk of them are coming from industrial and product designers. “A lot of them also use Adobe Creative Suite,” adds Belcher, who adds, “it’s funny how many of them ask us to make it work more like Illustrator or something like that.”

Two Voices: Programming the Future

When I asked them if their new Mac customers were more demanding or set the bar higher than Windows user Davidson was responded in the negative. But the voices of the Mac users are in fact a bit different, they admit. “Yes, Mac OS X users have expectations that are driven by their platform,” says Belcher, “but a lot of those expectations actually seem driven by Adobe…even though those tools are largely 2D. In every Adobe application you can click on an element and get its parameters. We hear that every week from our Mac customers; Rhino doesn’t work that way.”

Davidson adds, “We are going to have this unique problem going forward. Basically, we have two groups of very vocal users.” “At some point we are going to have to unify the UI/UX [for both groups] but keep it feeling natural on both platforms. That will be a big but interesting challenge.”

 

Part 2 Upcoming : More Future Development, Doing Full BIM Rhino, Mac Plugins and Working with Graphisoft