Animations in Grasshopper

Animations are great for telling the story of how the geometry was created or just plainly telling the story of how the model came to be. Unlike Blender that has a timeline feature, Grasshopper and Rhino doesn’t have many native functions to do animations.

Animations are a lot easier to do than most people think. You just have two things to worry about: where your camera is and what it’s pointing at. The skill is getting them to move synchronously and in the way you want it too.

Thankfully with all the geometrical functions we have in Grasshopper, this is quite easy to do. It’s a pain to setup but it’s doable and the end result is quite good. Albeit, not as good as using Blender or an actual animation program to do it but it’s good enough.

So, I created a plugin to help manage some of the animation logic that you would need in Grasshopper. The way I think about animations in Grasshopper is like a stop motion. You want to move your model and for every move, you take a screenshot, giving you a frame. Then later, in any video editing program, you can stitch those frames together to give you an animation.

Manakin

Manakin is a plugin that helps you manage your camera positions and geometry for the frames of the animations you’re shooting in. It’s harder to explain how it works. I rather just show you.

On Scripository, you’ll find all the sample files that you need to make it work and see how I have done it.

In a couple of weeks time, I plan to release a new Practice project that gives you some insight into using it for more complex animations like the ones I have been showing here.

Happy scripting,
Braden

P.S. If you want to request a workflow breakdown or a specific kind of script, reply to this email and let me know. I'm always collecting ideas for future ones.