Working with Lists

At the heart of any Grasshopper definition is the data. Grasshopper components process and create data, while wires transport the data between different components. In the last exercise, you may have already noticed that some wires look different from each other. This is because the visualization of the wire changes based on the structure of the data flowing through it. There are three types of data that can flow through a wire in Grasshopper:

DataTrees are the subject of the <next lesson>. For now, let’s focus on Lists, and how to work with them in Grasshopper.

Many components generate Lists of items as a result of their operation. For example, the Divide Curve component we saw in the first exercise uses one curve and a value specifying the number of divisions to create a List of Points along the Curve.

To create your own List from scratch, you can input multiple values into a Panel component. A shortcut for creating a Panel is to double-click on the canvas to bring up the search bar, then type ‘//’. This will create a new Panel, and place any text you type after the two slashes into the Panel. A Panel can be used to input text or numerical data. To create a List of values, put them on separate lines in the Panel. Make sure to right-click on the Panel and select the option for ‘Multiline Data’ to separate the lines into different items in a list. Otherwise, the text will be output as one big chunk.

You can find many useful components for creating and manipulating Lists in the ‘Sets’ tab in Grasshopper’s component toolbar.

In the ‘Sequence’ section of the ‘Sets’ tab, you will find several components for generating sets of numbers, which can be very useful for driving your computational models. In the previous exercise we used the Series component to generate a set of numbers given a starting value, a step value between…

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