Beginner Course 01

Grasshopper Foundations

Taught by a McNeel Authorized Rhino & Grasshopper Trainer

Four weeks from never having opened it to building a parametric massing study, a panelised façade and a set of site contours from scratch.

06Modules
24Lessons
8h 35mWritten
1 of 5Difficulty

Before this one: None. This is the one you start with.

01 The syllabus

6 modules · 24 lessons · 8h 35m written of 20h planned

01Rhino, only what you need1h 19m
  • The window, viewports, and the four navigation habitsFree16m
  • Precision: osnaps, gumball, typed coordinates21m
  • Curves, surfaces, breps, meshes: the four nouns24m
  • Exercise: a site boundary and a massing block18m
02What Grasshopper actually is1h 8m
  • Definition versus model: nothing is real until you bakeFree19m
  • Finding a component in two seconds12m
  • Params, components, and what a wire carries23m
  • Preview control, and the shortcut that saves your sanity14m
03Numbers, sliders and expressions1h 13m
  • Number Slider: ranges, precision, naming discipline17m
  • The Panel as your primary instrument15m
  • Expressions in inputs: the eight operators worth knowing22m
  • Series, Range, Random: three generators, three jobs19m
04Lists, before trees1h 28m
  • What a list is, and zero-indexing without hand-waving20m
  • List Item, Length, Sub List, Reverse, Shift26m
  • Cull Pattern and Cull Index: the checkerboard, properly18m
  • Sort by key, the one professional habit in this module24m
05Surfaces and the UV world1h 41m
  • Surface versus Brep versus polysurface25m
  • Divide Surface, Isotrim, Evaluate, Frames29m
  • Reparameterize: what it does, in one diagram16m
  • Exercise: panelise a doubly-curved surface31m
06Organising, baking and finishing1h 46m
  • A naming convention you will still understand in six months18m
  • Clusters: your first reusable block22m
  • Baking with layers and attributes20m
  • Capstone: a complete parametric pavilion46m

02 The files you leave with

Every definition you build here is yours.

Start file and finished file for every lesson, licensed for commercial work. Some of them I have since cleaned up and put on the scripts page, so you can have the finished version this afternoon and still build your own in the course.

03 Who teaches it

Jad Daoud presenting, mid-sentence, in front of a slide reading From Model to Impact

Hi, I'm Jad.

For years I watched good architects draw the same building three times. The brief moves and a fortnight of modelling goes in the bin. Somebody shifts a level and forty sheets have to be checked by hand. Everybody accepts it, because nobody has the time not to.

I never believed that was the job. It turns out it isn't.

Learning to build definitions changed what my week looks like. The model updates when the brief does. The schedule counts itself. The drawing set comes out of the file instead of being redrawn against it. That is not a trick for working faster. It is the difference between spending the day on the design and spending it on the paperwork around the design.

That is the whole reason to bother with any of this, and it is what I teach. I'm one of two authorized Rhino and Grasshopper Trainers in Lebanon. More than 250 people in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and India have sat through the argument already.

I write the definitions, film the lessons, draw the covers and answer the email. There are seven courses because I have taught all of these disciplines, and they are not one subject: what a landscape architect needs from Grasshopper is not what somebody detailing joinery needs. So each course is tailored to its own field rather than being one course with the examples swapped out. It is also why your email gets an answer instead of a ticket number.

04 Before you ask

The things people write in about.

If the answer you want is not here, it is one email away, and the same person who wrote the courses reads it.

Do I need to know Rhino already?

No. Foundations opens with a short Rhino module that covers only what the course uses: the viewports, precision tools, and the four kinds of geometry. If you already use Rhino, skip it. The other six courses assume Foundations, or the same ground covered some other way.

Which one should I start with?

If you have never opened Grasshopper, Foundations. If you already build definitions and your problem is getting them into Revit, go straight to Rhino.Inside.Revit. If you work in site and landscape, that course assumes Foundations and nothing else.

When does it open?

The Rhino.Inside.Revit course is being filmed first. I am not naming a date I cannot defend yet. When the first lessons are cut I will put one here, and the waitlist hears it before the front page does.

Which Rhino version?

Rhino 8, and every lesson where the interface differs will be recorded twice, once for Rhino 8 and once for Rhino 9 with Grasshopper 2. Included, not an upgrade.

Do I get the files?

Yes. Every lesson will ship a start file and a finished file, version-stamped against the Rhino release they were made in, and licensed for commercial work.

Is it a subscription?

No. You buy a course once and it stays yours, the files with it, and that includes the Rhino 9 lessons when they are recorded. Nothing renews and nothing expires.