My New Grasshopper book is out!

In the next few posts I’ll briefly pause my discussion of organic modeling techniques, but I will come back to that soon (next up in the series will be on Diffusion Limited Aggregation… very cool stuff!).

Today’s post is simply a brief announcement, just in case anyone missed all of my twitter, facebook, and forum posts about it… My new Grasshopper book has just been published!!

In the first week it has quickly become the #1 new release in Amazon’s “3D Graphic Design” category, and has at times been as high as #3 in that category overall.

Here’s a little more about the content and intended audience than what’s on the publishers website. You can also find this in the discussion at the Grasshopper forum, here.

The book is in three distinct parts. The first part is a fairly basic introduction to the package, and is geared mostly toward beginners.  Here I present several of the most common components with a series of small examples. There are discussions of lists, data trees, data manipulation with components such as Cross Reference and Flip, conditional list processing with the Dispatch and Weave components, curve parameters, surface parameters, mapping geometry with Morph components, and manipulating Meshes.

In the second part I present four advanced tutorials so readers can see how to put together lots of ideas to make complex objects. My hope is that even experts will get something out of looking at these tutorials. They are all original, and experienced Grasshopper users may (hopefully) see Grasshopper get used here in ways they hadn’t seen before. Here’s one of the images from this part, in a tutorial on making custom bevel shapes with only native Grasshopper components:

As stated in the product description, the third pard is a component reference. Most of the work here was taking the help file descriptions of each component and typesetting (read: fighting with LaTeX) them in an easy-to-read format that might be useful for any Grasshopper user.

If the book does well, I’m planning a more advanced sequel. I’m very open to suggestions for content. One person has already suggested I include information on writing your own components, which is something that I think would be good to include. I was also planning on giving some information on the use of several common plug-ins (e.g. Kangaroo, Anemone, Mesh+, etc). Please post other suggestions here!

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