Add-ons and plug-ins

One of the best things about the way that Grasshopper is built is how easy it is to add extensions and additional capabilities beyond what it can already do straight out of the box. One great place to look for plugins and add-ons to Grasshopper is the food4rhino website. You can see I'm here right now. I'm under this App section, and I'm just using the filters here on the left to sort for Grasshopper specific plugins and add-ons. And you can see we're listing almost 800 different options here, which cover all sorts of applications, from structural analysis to physics simulations to version controls and many, many others. Let's scroll down a little bit here, and I want to find this one I'm interested in called Pufferfish. We'll use this in other videos. And this is a really cool set of components that allows us to do blending and morphing and interpolation of different shapes. So let's click on Pufferfish. I'm going to click this download link here. That should jump me down the page. And I can see different versions of the plugins, I can see descriptions for the differences between those versions, and then I can see which versions of Rhino and which platforms each plugin will work for. So I'm on Rhino 8 for Windows. So I can see I'm covered here. I'm going to go ahead and download this. You will need to log in to the food4rhino website. You can either create a login specifically for that website, or you can use the login info that you use for your Rhino install. Now, I've already downloaded this, so I'm going to go ahead and switch to my Downloads folder, and we'll take a look at what we got. So food4rhino will give us a zip file containing all of the files components that we'll need for whatever plugin we've downloaded. I've already gone ahead and extracted that zip file into a folder, so let's double click here, and I can see I've got a Pufferfish folder. And inside that is one Grasshopper component, as well as some Readme instructions. So depending on the plugin you're downloading, the contents here might be a little bit different, but you'll always have some sort of instructions that will tell you exactly how to do the install. So let's jump into Rhino and Grasshopper and get started installing Pufferfish. So I've got a blank Rhino file, a blank Grasshopper definition. All I need to do from here is come up to the File menu, and under Special Folders, I want to link to this Components folder. And so this jumps me to the folder in my explorer where I need to place that Pufferfish file. And all I need to do is from my Downloads folder, click and drag this Pufferfish3-0.gha and drag it into Libraries. That's it. Let's jump back to Grasshopper and Rhino, and we'll need to close out and restart both. So I'll go ahead and do that. And I can see over my Grasshopper window, under my Component tabs, we have this new tab called Pufferfish. And I can click on that and get access to all of the additional components that that plugin has to offer. So we'll get more in-depth with Pufferfish in other videos, but that's just a brief glimpse into the huge range of possibilities of plugins and add-ons that you can get to make Grasshopper even more powerful.