176: Campfire Series - ‘The Rhinoceros Story’, with Scott Davidson

176: ‘The Rhinocerous Story’, with Scott Davidson

Evan Troxel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the TRXL podcast. I'm Evan Troxel. In this episode, I have a fascinating conversation with Scott Davidson about the incredible origin story of Rhino. He has been at McNeel and Associates for more than two decades now, so I think he knows a thing or two, podcast to tell us all about it. What began as a simple AutoCAD plugin in the early 90s evolved into something much bigger through an unexpected series of events. Scott shares the surprising story behind how Rhino got its name. its journey from industrial design to architecture, and how an accidental leak helped shape the software industry.

We also discuss how some of architecture's biggest names, including Frank Gehry, discovered and adopted Rhino early on, leading to its widespread use in complex geometric design and digital fabrication today.

Real quick, before we get into today's [00:01:00] conversation, I would very much appreciate your support by subscribing to the show wherever you watch or listen. And please leave a review on Apple podcast or Spotify. It really does help the show.

This was a great conversation with Scott and as usual, there's an extensive amount of additional information in the show notes. So please be sure to check that out. I recently posted on LinkedIn asking for love letters to Rhino and the responses were way too much to read here on the podcast. So definitely follow that link in the show notes so that you can read up and I hope contribute to it as well.

You can find all the links in your podcast app if you're a paid member of TRXL+ or you can find them over at the website, which is trxl. co. All right, it's time to crack open your favorite beverages, find comfortable seats around the campfire. Settle in and enjoy listening to Scott Davidson tell the rhino [00:02:00] story.

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Scott Davidson: Yeah, we have a lot of new people, you know, we're dealing with, with, uh, retirement a lot. Now that we've been in business for so long, people are getting old

Evan Troxel: That is the beginning of the podcast, right there.

Scott Davidson: Oh,

Evan Troxel: We found the entry.

Scott Davidson: that's

too entry into the Rhino story, right there. That's going to be great.

Yeah. Great. Great.

Evan Troxel: You don't feel old. You guys are doing amazing work. Cutting edge work.

Scott Davidson: Thanks, thanks, yeah, yeah, yeah. I always say, you know, we can, we can do in 30 years what most companies only promise in 3. So,

Evan Troxel: It must be nice. Uh, you guys have, have some luxuries in that regard, maybe, or maybe you don't see it that way. I don't know.

Scott Davidson: No, I mean, no, it's good, I mean, it's, it's fun, you know, it's a challenge every day. And, and, you know, I've been doing this for a long time, and a lot of [00:03:00] us have. And, And, I have to tell you, it still feels fresh, because we're just constantly trying to just solve customers problems.

And, and so it doesn't, the nice part is it doesn't get any more complex than that.

Um, and there's never a shortage, there's never a shortage of problems to solve. Mm

Evan Troxel: amazing community. You have an amazing relationship with your customer base. And I think we'll get into all of that, but. I mean, your forum is an amazingly, and you know, I could use all the adjectives I could come up with. It's incredible. It's supportive. I mean, there's, there's, there's a lot of back and forth.

There's a lot of, there's some heat in there sometimes for

Scott Davidson: Oh yeah, oh

Evan Troxel: there's, it's, it's driven by passion and it's driven by high standards and expectations because

you guys have delivered for so long. And, uh, And so you, like you said, you have no shortage of, of things to go off of. And, and that's a place that's just got an ama, an amazing collection of [00:04:00] individuals who are constantly pushing in there.

Scott Davidson: Yep, yep, yep, and, and, and, and our structure, you know, we've had to make a lot of choices over the years to keep our structure enough so that we could make sure everybody has a hand in that and make sure everybody can get to that forum and, and, and it does, it means you're, the company has to fundamentally be set up different in order to allow that interaction,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

But, but I think customers truly feel like they have a voice. and so.

I mean, like, let's go back to 1992. Let's go pre internet. I mean, it's not really pre internet. Right. But it's, it's pre

worldwide web.

Scott Davidson: it's,

get, yeah, yeah, it's definitely a, like, bulletin board kind of,

yeah, individual servers sitting in people's, you call, you have to know which modem to call

to get in. That's

right,

Evan Troxel: right, And I mean, and, and I, it even takes me back to like those old school AOL chat rooms. Like there were definitely 3d chat rooms on [00:05:00] AOL back then. right.

Scott Davidson: Oh yeah,

yeah,

yeah,

yeah, yeah, yeah, and there

Evan Troxel: kind of what my introduction to it all.

Scott Davidson: yeah,

yeah, that's, and we, you know, we had some for. for. Rhino, or what was thought of to be Rhino at that point in time, even though we didn't know that's what it was going to be. So, we, I don't know, I've told you that story, haven't I?

Evan Troxel: I don't think so.

Scott Davidson: Oh, well, so, we were AutoCAD dealer, and, um, did some plug ins for AutoCAD and, and, uh, in Seattle there was a, an old Boeing, um, NURBS mathematicians group that, that contracted with a lot of different PhDs and things around the world.

GE, Toyota, whatever. And, um, they kind of got tired of talking to other PhDs and they wanted to, to mass market their NURBS library. And so they looked up in the yellow pages at that point in time, found the closest AutoCAD dealer developer, which happened to be [00:06:00] us. And, uh, kind of said, Hey, you know, do you think you put our NURBS library in AutoCAD?

We had a bunch of other plugins for AutoCAD that we sold. And we were like, yeah, we can take a look and we can try. See what's going on. So we kind of, um, started to push it in there. And doing AutoCAD, I think it was 20, maybe 14? Maybe AutoCAD 14? It's hard. It's hard to do 3D in AutoCAD

1. And it's,

Evan Troxel: I remember the 3d face command.

Scott Davidson: I mean, yeah, well, they had some of those things and things, but then, you know, just the interface was always kind of set up for 2D.

And so, and, you know, we always have this thing, and we still do, is where, you know, we try to do a little command that just works, and then we try to get to the customers as fast as we can, like, that week.

You know, we get feedback and we kind of work with the customers on a way of trying to develop a feature as opposed to try to spec it or something [00:07:00] like that. We just kind of work through it that way. And, and, but that, you know, can take a lot of rewriting and things like that. And that was really hard to do in AutoCAD.

Um, and so we wrote this little test harness, this little Windows test harness that had four viewports. And, uh, and a command line. And so internally we could write, and it could, you know, navigate in 3D. We could write the command, like what does this feel like? What does that feel like? And, and then, um, and then when we kind of got it right, then we'd put it in AutoCAD.

Well, that got leaked out to these customers where, so we started saying, Hey, why don't you just try this little test harness so you can try this out really quick. And then eventually we'll get AutoCAD, you know, maybe in a month or two or

Evan Troxel: this was an intentional leak that

Scott Davidson: Well, it was just, it was just the easiest way. You know, so one of our people was working internally.

It's like, Hey, today I have it in this little test harness. It's going to take me three days to get it in an AutoCAD [00:08:00] version. Why don't you just, I'll just keep, I'll just send this to you. Right.

Evan Troxel: How did that happen back then? How did You, send stuff around?

Scott Davidson: you you did a, you had an FTP site

and right. You know, hopefully you can give them a link. If not, you had to, you know, say, log in here and,

Evan Troxel: right.

Scott Davidson: you know, um, I'll It was harder. So, um, but, uh, the, what started to happen was over time is that, you know, people would say, Hey, yeah, that feels right. That's really cool.

That's really great. And then, so we'd drop it in AutoCAD and, um, nobody said a word.

Evan Troxel: Why?

Scott Davidson: Well, cause,

cause we've,

Evan Troxel: deafening

Scott Davidson: silence is deafening because nobody cared

because they already had it in the test harness.

So whatever work they were trying to do,

they could, they were already doing it

And, you know, we're a little slow over here, but, but,

it was like, it was like thinking, yeah, [00:09:00] it was like, we were like thinking, Hmm, that's kind of interesting.

Evan Troxel: Yeah

Scott Davidson: So, 100, 000 beta testers later, we decided that, you know what? This, This, is feeling like a product, right? Yeah. and the AutoCAD plugin never actually got released. Um, and so, you know, then we get into the, you know, you want to know how much it's, it's, it's, uh, uh, community, uh, participation, then the question is, what are we going to name this thing?

We're going to call it Solid This, or Accu That, or, you know, Exact This, or Precision That, or whatever,

Evan Troxel: I mean, it should have been Cyber something back then,

Scott Davidson: Yeah, Yeah, yeah, Cybersomething, you know, all these different things, you know. And it's always two words, right? Slam together. Um, and, and, in the end, it was actually called Rhino from the very, very beginning as it was a, [00:10:00] that was just the name somebody had given it off a postcard on their wall when they were putting the framework together in the first place.

Um, They're like, no, just keep it, I mean ultimately, after a bunch of debate, just keep it Rhino.

Just keep

Evan Troxel: that was like the internal code name, the

Scott Davidson: That's correct.

Evan Troxel: were Just using and then you're like, yeah, why mess it? Why mess with it

Scott Davidson: Well, and then we figured out, you know what's cool about Rhino is that it translates into all languages as Rhino, pretty much all languages, as Rhinoceros.

And, um, yeah. And we thought we'd get so much trouble for not being professional enough. And, uh. That didn't happen.

I mean, any any more than we get in trouble for not being professional enough in general, but, but, uh, yeah, so that's how we ended up with Rhino. And so it was really the community convincing us that it was a product

was really how it started.

Evan Troxel: So what year was the first release? What are we talking about here?

Scott Davidson: 96. [00:11:00]

Evan Troxel: Okay.

Scott Davidson: So I think we, I think we were in the first release about then. Um, did a SIGGRAPH, and that was kind of the rollout, and uh, yeah.

Evan Troxel: So I think it was SIGGRAPH that I first saw you guys. And it was probably you and Bob at a, like a folding card table, kind of a folding table, which was, you know, still pretty common for a 10x10 booth. And I think I was there to see, like, Electric Image and FormZ, and everybody had booths back then.

Everybody

Scott Davidson: Right,

Evan Troxel: And you guys had, you know, a four viewport, you know, And you had like a car fender modeled. So you were showing off the NURBS capabilities and you even had like the zebra pattern on it. So you could check the tangencies and, you know, see how the surfaces were flowing together.

Scott Davidson: Mm hmm.

Evan Troxel: And I was Not interested, Scott, architect here.

I stopped and I looked, I'm like, Oh, that's nice. You know, and I'm, I'm like, you [00:12:00] know, Drawing walls and putting doors in them and stuff, right? So, I am curious to hear how you've taken over the hearts and minds of so many architects, because I'm sure that was a process. But you didn't start there, I mean, right?

Scott Davidson: Not even close. It was really marine. You know, we're in Seattle, right? So there's a lot of marine people and boat hulls are hard. Um, they're complex in shape and you can't just fake it. You know, they can't be an arc. They can't be multiple arcs tagged together, right? The water knows the difference. And so, so that's one area that we did.

And then the other one is, um, industrial design. A lot of industrial design work where, where, um, the the form on exterior form, you know, is really critical to what they're trying to communicate or how you interact with it. Um, and so those were the two areas that, two markets that we started with.

Mm

Evan Troxel: about a [00:13:00] NURBS modeler. Did you do any solids in the beginning? Was it only surfaces?

Scott Davidson: We always had the ability to join them together. So, so it was, uh, yeah.

Evan Troxel: But it's a little convoluted. It was difficult to do that. It wasn't like

Scott Davidson: It

still

Evan Troxel: had to be really good at, like, matching up those edges, and

Scott Davidson: Yeah,

and you still do

I mean that if you think about you think that the interfaces for multiple CAD products some Some only allow you to have a solid every step of the way

and if you ever to break it They just don't that that step doesn't work

right you have to modify it to To get it to work at that time

Evan Troxel: Right.

Scott Davidson: And, you know, for us, we can, you can, you know, you can compound your problems one on top of the other, one on top of the other, until you get to the end.

But, um, yeah, it's, it's, it's, there's a lot of geometry kernels that demand a certain level of, [00:14:00] of tolerant modeling. And, you know, limited within what they can generate. And Rhino's not like that. Rhino's, um, because we write our own. You know, it's our own NURBS kernel. We can allow tolerances to get big. We can read stuff in that isn't solid.

And we can read stuff that's not valid, actually, mathematically not valid, and do something with it. Um, but that's actually, we think, one of our strengths, even though, in terms of, for instance, passing these models around, you can create models that won't go, you know, to a solids modeler because it's not tolerant enough.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Scott Davidson: Um, and so, you know, there's kind of a trade off there. How do you, how are you flexible enough? Um, but still, you know, to be able to do a lot of things quickly and fast and in the design process and things like that, yet be accurate enough to fabricate from ultimately to be as accurate as you're, the [00:15:00] machines you're manufacturing with.

And that's, that's a real, that's a real balance there. Yeah. And we just have a, we're in kind of, in a different kind of spot there. I mean, it's one of the reasons architects like us is because when you create something from a design perspective, ultimately you can get that to fabrication with accurate enough information to actually drive the machines.

And, and so, um, so I would say that, that, you know, initially in the 90s, There wasn't a lot of digital fabrication on an architectural scale. that's

something that's Oh, go ahead.

Evan Troxel: was just going to say, but this really is driven from your early mechanical CAD days, Right, Like that mechanical CAD transitioned to CNC at some point, like lasers and CNC, laser cutting and CNC and all those things. But

like, like other large, 3D modeling platforms for much bigger scales with much, much larger, you know, like [00:16:00] we're not talking about really close tolerances with architectural modeling anyway, right, Because construction, like it's great if you're within an inch, it's great if you're within a quarter inch, but you're talking about way smaller tolerances, jewelry design, marine design, industrial design, all of these things. And, and coming from your CAD roots, I mean, that had to be a big reason for that, right.

Scott Davidson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was, that was, that was the reason that we had that accuracy. Um, but part of the reason we have that accuracy too is that it was an area that we felt like there was a hole in the market. Like it was, you know, it's easy to make a mesh model. It's easy to make a 2D model, um, but there wasn't a lot of tools that were accessible.

Like I said, there's, you know, older CAD products that have been around for a long, long time, but that was maybe affordable, that was easy to use, that could work on regular hardware, um, that still had that accuracy to be able to machine from. [00:17:00] Um, and, Even at the earliest time, that was something that we still pride ourselves on, but that's, that's something that was really important.

Now, what was fortunate for us is that we were growing up in the time of, of the development of those tools on a larger scale. So, you know, one of the first things we see is we see, uh, 5 axis CNC machines that are 12 feet wide and 60 feet long.

And, And, then. processes to be able to machine those big shapes. So of course in the Marine industry that takes over in a lot of ways, or like you're saying, plasma cutters, you know, that are larger and larger and larger. Um, and then that started to affect architecture. So, so you get to, um, some of the pioneers like Frank Gehry. And Frank Gehry is doing, a lot of shapes that don't make sense in 2D.[00:18:00]

You know, you just can't draw them in 2D. You have to have all the 3D coordinates in space. And, and they're trying to figure all that out and they're using, you know, they're using Katia and they're using, right, they're using all these tools. The only thing they had available at that time. And, uh, actually one of the very, it's funny, we didn't start in architecture, but one of the very first copies we sold was to Frank Gehry's personal credit card.

And, and we're like, Yeah, that's great. And then we think, Oh, that's like the whole market. Because at that time

Evan Troxel: No one was building buildings like

Scott Davidson: nobody was doing it.

And, And, you know, we'd go to SIGGRAPH. We talked about SIGGRAPH earlier, right? We'd go to SIGGRAPH and say, Hey, you know, Frank Gehry bought it. And architects would look at you and said, yeah, but, but I'm not Frank Gehry.

Right.

You know, it doesn't make, I'm not going to do things like that. Um, but what's happened over the years is. More fabricators can work digitally. What's happened over the years is there actually are more [00:19:00] and more companies, you know, architectural companies that are creating those kinds of shapes. And successfully.

And we essentially kind of have grown up in that. That's actually, you know, this is a generational thing, right? So, hey, you gotta wait for the technology to kind of mature.

And, uh, and so, um, and it's, you mentioned, you know, 1 inch, um, we have companies now that like, if their concrete person isn't using digital technology to make sure that it's within 1 16th of an inch, that's 20 percent more on the budget just for that, that.

Fabricator, right? Because they know the next person's going to have to pay for that.

And, and, and, and, you know, and, but then when it works right, you get, you get off, you can have off site construction, you can

be doing things in parallel, you can drop them on the site in big units, they all fit together, [00:20:00] and, uh, you can really idealize that, and there's so many examples of that over the last 15 years.

Um, so, so that's, I mean, if you had to talk about an area that rhinos used, you know, that, that's really, I mean, it's used in a lot of other places, but from an architectural point of view, I think that's what you, um, that, that's where it's really honed out, and a lot of, uh, most of the newest stadiums done in 15 years, those are all, you know, there's a heavy dose of rhino in those.

For instance, as an example, if anybody wants to look locally in their area.

Evan Troxel: yeah,

right. Did, did that shift happen with your, did you see that coming? Were you really working with that audience to develop the tools to do that? Or was it really the fabrication connection aspect that drove people naturally to your platform because you could, you were already there?[00:21:00]

Scott Davidson: it was both. So, so the fabrication piece has been there from the very beginning. And, and, um, uh, the ability to have an SDK and to develop on top of it. So early on, and so a lot of it is just the sheer talent of the people that use Rhino. the customers. And so they would, you know, we had something called Rhino script, right?

Which was VB script with some tools to make it easier to work in Rhino. And they'd write these wonderful, amazing things, scripts that put these shapes together and got them the information they wanted to, however they wanted to, had to decide how to fabricate it. Um, and that drove us to try to make that work better, right?

Cause. they were doing the work, but it was maybe just too hard or they want to do something extra. And so this isn't, we, we don't drive the bus here. I mean, this is always, those two things are [00:22:00] always together. And so really these really, really amazing, talented people started putting this stuff together, doing really cool shapes, which are really fun to see.

And then, and then, you know, we just tried to march down there and then all of a sudden, right, you're seeing more and more of this happen. And. And then you, of course, feel like you want to do it more, and, and, and it's even before, that was before Grasshopper, and that was, you know, when, when Rhino was, you know, maybe Rhino 3, maybe, maybe Rhino 2, you know, you're starting to see some of that.

Um, And then, you know, kind of, so the rest of this is actually maybe a response to that. So look what they're doing. How can we make that better? Hey, let's try this. And then they'd say, Hey, that's pretty cool. Then they'd use that. And then they try to expand it, right. Or they'd write their own stuff to make it bigger.

And then, you know, so it's always this, it's always this balance with us. We don't plan. We, um, don't necessarily innovate. [00:23:00] We just really just try to help people. Customers do what they're trying to do, try to do it better. And, And, the nice part is, you know, they're pushing the envelope of what you were using, right?

They're trying to, they're using their, they're putting all their talent and effort into it, which You know, inspires us to kind of keep pushing. And then when we do something new, it's kind of cool, because a lot of times they're really excited, because they can do something they weren't able to do before.

And then, you know what I'm saying? It's this, it's actually this kind of cool dynamic, and it's not, I don't know what we're going to do for Rhino 10, whatever. Um, but I do know, you know, what people are complaining about on the forum, you know, yesterday and today, and, you know, last night. five years. And,

you know, and we, we always doing that.

So I, it's never a simple answer.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Scott Davidson: So

Evan Troxel: What, [00:24:00] what was that initial release like? Like what kind of tools were in there with Rhino 1. 0?

Scott Davidson: I wish I remembered it was, you know, imagine, imagine, you know, the, the, some of the curve commands and you know, your classic one loft two rail, sweep, trim, split

joint,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Scott Davidson: right? None of the drafting stuff, none of the rendering stuff, um,

Evan Troxel: So it was really focused on surface modeling at the very beginning and not not like two dimensional representations

Scott Davidson: not at all, not at all. Only, the only reason you'd have the curve commands were to, in order to create, you know, layouts for the, to create the surfaces.

Evan Troxel: So then was it, was it really seen as a companion to a CAD package at that

Scott Davidson: Always is.

Rhino always is. You know, there's, that's actually, that, that, that was always true. It was never, you know, it was never, and has really never been a mainline, [00:25:00] um,

you know, how you can classify. Yeah, I

mean, Revit's a, Revit's a architectural platform.

SolidWorks is a, you know, Rhino's a companion to all these.

I mean, we price it that way too. Um, It's, it's a, people always call it a Swiss Army knife,

you know, it can, it can do those things that, that other products usually can't, um, but, but it doesn't, it doesn't do a lot of things that a lot of other products do, do, so.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, you, you really hold, hold to solving those problems and not going outside of your, your expertise and half assing something, right?

Scott Davidson: No, we just, well, we, we, we unfortunately think that we probably half assed everything, but, um, I don't know.

Evan Troxel: You heard it here.

Scott Davidson: We, yeah, unfortunately, but, um, but, but we, the, how do I [00:26:00] say this? Um, we, we definitely are interested in, in really trying to make tools that work and it's not, and it's not like we're, we expect people to be using Rhino, um, by itself, you know, it's part of a process.

I mean, it's one of the reasons we read and write 41 different file formats.

Evan Troxel: Mm hmm.

Scott Davidson: both NURBS and Meshes and SubDs and you know, and that's another thing about Rhino that's interesting is there's not many products that are trying to make Meshes, SubDs and NURBS all first class citizens

within the same environment.

Right? So you can kind of translate between them and you can move between those depending on what you need to do. And, you know, meshes are still bad for fabrication and and NURBS really don't animate very well. You know, and animation tools, you know what I'm saying? I mean, depending on where it's going to go, they, who knows what's coming in and out.

And so being able to make those work together is really great. Um, the only reason we're able to do that actually is because, you know, [00:27:00] we, it's our geometry kernel. And so, we do all the writing for it so we can try to figure out how these very different geometries relate to each other. Um, and,

and, but it's all the Swiss Army Knife part.

Yeah,

Evan Troxel: the Swiss Army. I'm thinking about your customers and like what, how wide their needs are, right, And, and you're not serving one industry, you're serving a bunch of industries.

And so you can't just go all in on what one customer base really needs when you have that many industries that you're serving.

Scott Davidson: And we rely on plugins for that. We rely on plugin vendors and their expertise.

Marines.

Evan Troxel: when you, were writing this to be very open, like you said, you had an SDK, people, you have Rhino script. I mean,

was that just, that was how you were going to do it from the beginning? Or was that a decision that was hard to make? Like, how did that work its way into

Scott Davidson: It's a, it was a strategy that we had from the very beginning, in that [00:28:00] we didn't think we could write it all ourselves, and we definitely didn't have the expertise to do it. You know, like, we didn't, we don't understand jewelry. We didn't understand the marine industry, whatever it might be. Um, so, yeah.

And so, writing that from the very beginning was great. Now, the advantage to that is that you get really talented customers that can write their own stuff. commands. And so they're making the product better for you. I

mean, you know, they're making the product customized to their workflow

and that's really cool to see.

And we didn't have to do it. Um, and, and so that, that early on kind of encourages people to, to write that way. Now we sometimes have to be, you know, disciplined enough to write everything in a way that always has an SDK that isn't just a command and that can, that sometimes we're not very disappointed in it, but.

But that's something that we did early on and it's only become [00:29:00] actually more and more important. And Grasshopper is actually one of the biggest outcroppings of that concept, although in and of itself Grasshopper is now a platform,

Evan Troxel: right,

Scott Davidson: right, which has exploded on us and caught us off guard yet again on, on, on, you know, what was happening.

Evan Troxel: When did Grasshopper come onto the scene as a, as a plugin?

Scott Davidson: I want to say that early on, it was probably 2006, something like that. But, but, you know, it took a long time to, to move forward. It took a long time to, to mature through what it is today. Um,

Evan Troxel: I mean,

Scott Davidson: no, no,

Evan Troxel: together and then, and then it like took on a life over that time, right? But like,

Scott Davidson: It's because it took a life on itself.

Evan Troxel: yeah,

Scott Davidson: You know, it, it took, it takes a while to figure out. This is an interesting part about the way we do, do, do work [00:30:00] is, is it takes a while for technologies and products to decide what they are. You know, initially Grasshopper was supposed to be, you know, you put five commands together and it, um, and that's a script, a really short script.

And then you, um, uh, and then people were like, well, you know, it could do this and this and then, you know, all of a sudden what's supposed to be five is like 50. right? And it looks like spaghetti and, but it's doing what they want to do. And, uh, or it is a good one. So, you know, it's a five, four building and they have this copy, this copy, this copy, cause we don't have trees, right?

So, you know, bang, bang, bang, bang. We don't have lists of lists. And so they need them. So they, you know, do that. And then, you know, we'd said, Oh, we better put trees in there so that we can have lists of lists and we can have less, you know, everything can be compacted. And then over time, it's [00:31:00] like, wow, this is actually a development platform.

It's not just a scripting engine for Rhino and it's not scripting anymore. They're actually doing some really serious work on it. And then of course we have thousands of plugins, some of them just adding components that we never got around to. Some of them, you know, adding 20 components that all introduce a whole completely different way of working in Grasshopper, you know.

Um, and so that, that is out of hand too. It's really cool, but it's out of hand.

Evan Troxel: but it took on a life of its own.

Scott Davidson: Yeah, yeah, Yeah,

yeah.

Evan Troxel: driven by the community though, right? I mean, this

Scott Davidson: Absolutely. yeah,

By the talent of the community, like by, I mean, it's not just people getting back to us and saying, I need this and this.

It's people doing, doing the work and

saying, you know, I This is, you know, I've gotten this far and, and, you know, initially we used to say [00:32:00] you shouldn't be doing that.

Like, Rhino's not supposed to, Grasshopper's not supposed to be able to do that. And they're like, but it is, it's right here. And so, um, but that's become a gigantic a gigantic piece and it started in architecture. You know, Grasshopper really started in architecture. And what's interesting, you were talking about how we didn't start in architecture.

What's interesting is now Grasshopper is being used in industrial design and marine design. You know, as it matures, it's essentially coming back around to the original people that used Rhino.

Evan Troxel: Wow.

Scott Davidson: Yeah. Yeah. So it's very,

very interesting, but you cannot underestimate the impact Grasshopper's had on. Just as much as Rhino in itself, as on all these workflows.

Evan Troxel: So tell me how it became part of Rhino. Like you, obviously this was happening alongside Rhino, like the, through the developer community that you,

Scott Davidson: David's probably, David's, obviously David's the best one to explain what happened, but, [00:33:00] but, the, the idea was that we had RhinoScript, and, so you could script, you know, make simple scripts, and, and it could do things in Rhino, but it was typing, you know, it was hard, um, to type, and, and so the question was, could we make it more accessible?

Could we make Grasshopper, uh, you know, make a, a, a scripting language that just was easier? And, and David came up, I mean it's all David, um, came up with this idea of kind of this neural network, you know, this network of batteries, components that are wired together. And, um, kind of started experimenting with it.

It, of course, worked. And, um, and so it was really building on that. Momentum of that RhinoScript thing that we felt when we knew we had something right is used to be when we had RhinoScript classes and we'd have 30 architects in there. You know, we'd get [00:34:00] done with the three days and let's say five of them really got it and the other 25 really had to, you know, had a lot more work to do to kind of get their head around it better.

And once we started teaching Grasshopper, which is no spelling, um, You know,

because architects can't spell. Never

have been

Evan Troxel: we, all have to. look at the keyboard while we type

Scott Davidson: That's right, exactly. I'm an architect, so I get to say that, right? So, um, uh, You know, there would be only five people in the thing that really didn't quite get on top of it, right?

And there'd be 25 people, or 20 people, or however many people in a class, but quite a few of the people, they get it, and they could do stuff with

It

Evan Troxel: it was the opposite

Scott Davidson: It was just the opposite, just more accessible. Um,

Evan Troxel: You think that's because of the visual nature of architects in general?

Scott Davidson: partially, partially it's the visual nature of it. Partially. It is the, I think like every step it's always [00:35:00] running, right? So every step of the way, when you make a mistake, you got to kind of solve that little

mistake. You don't, That's right,

that's Right.

and, and you kind of keep pushing along, you got your little 3D panel, you keep pushing along, make sure what the outputs are and things like that.

Um, and so part of it is that, part of it is visual. Um, and, and it just makes sense to people, where code, code, you know, is just a, it's not, it's, It's easy to read. If you haven't read it for a long time, it's hard to re engage where a grasshopper script, I mean, sure, if it's gone for a long time, it takes a while to figure out what you

Evan Troxel: Depends how big it is, right?

Scott Davidson: yeah,

it depends how big it is, but at least it's easy to kind of follow what's going on.

Right. As opposed to code, you know, where it says, okay, go to the subroutine. Well, where's that subroutine, right. You know, and you find it in some other file that's associated with this file or whatever else. Um, and so, part of it's being visual, part of it is, is, you know, you, you see all the [00:36:00] inputs and the outputs you can use, right? You drop it, you already know what you have to answer to put it in, and you already know what it's, you know, so.

Evan Troxel: Expectations Of each component,

Scott Davidson: Of each component are

really clear, um, if the, you know, and it does really hard, it works very, Grasshopper works very, very hard to translate the data. So, you know, you put. a point in there and it needs a, that's probably not a very good example.

You put a plane, you put a point in there but it needs a plane, it'll try it's best to convert that point to a plane. Which, which code driven, code driven, um, programming languages usually don't do that. They usually, Python does that a little bit now, but you know, of course that's a little older, or a little newer.

Um, application, or, you know, there are some that are trying to do that, but Grasshopper works very, very hard to, you can be really sloppy with your data types, and we'll do our best to convert them. So, so that's part of it. [00:37:00] There's a, it's just, there's a lot of, um, there's a lot of things about Grasshopper that are really, um, I call it magic, but there's a lot of, there's a lot of really nice things about Grasshopper that these are all David's.

Um, that

Evan Troxel: And did you guys see that, see that value right away when, when that was?

Scott Davidson: Uh I don't think anybody did. I mean, it's fun to work with. We saw that value.

Sometimes that's what drives us. It was fun. Um,

it looked cool. Uh, you know, those kinds of things. Um, but until we got it to customers,

right? And this was early.

Evan Troxel: of scratching your head, like what, who would use this Like

Scott Davidson: We always do that.

I mean, that's how we,

that's how we, that's, uh, yeah, we're slow. but no, I mean, this is always kind of like, take a shot in the dark and see what happens, and, and then, and then follow the customer, you know, and, and I, I keep, I hate to quit harping, keep harping on that, but it really is that simple, um, and try to [00:38:00] be open, and, and, and so, I mean, you know, every single person in this company, Every day, better talk to a customer.

And if they're not, there's probably something wrong with our internal processes. You know, to make, cause, you've really gotta be close to what people are trying to do. Cause we're not smart enough to figure it out. So

Evan Troxel: one of the most important ones that, that this platform created was computational designer.

Scott Davidson: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: And I'm sure you didn't see that coming, but now you have this, this, these customers that you can talk to who are passionate about solving these geometry problems through visual programming, which was, I don't even know if that was a thing before, you know, coined as a term.

Um, so, I mean, talk about that from a, it seems like it would have blown your mind, like, just to see, like, looking back and seeing, like, how, how that happened through, through that. [00:39:00] software development process.

Scott Davidson: Yeah, you could say that. I mean, there is no way you can imagine we are where we are. And, and, yeah, there's a whole world of computational design that didn't exist, um, before Grasshopper, let's say. But it was even after Grasshopper, it took a while for it to form up and, and, create these, these, these ideas of what they are.

And, um, Yeah, that, that kind of, the size of this, the scale of this really did blow everybody's mind, including David's, by the way. Um, you know, we kind of started to figure out that, wow, this is, this is a platform. This is not just a little scripting thing. And, And, um, and so then you have a different level of responsibility.

Like, how do you, how do you move this thing forward without breaking everything? How do you, um, you know, how do you keep it available and running? when they change operating systems. Because people now have these [00:40:00] big workflows and these giant projects hanging on your product. And, you know, then we have to get more serious about, you know, releasing stuff that works.

Or, uh, you know, making sure that we don't do something to ruin their day. Um, but, but it, it, yeah, nobody could have predicted this. Um, really. Well, I mean, somebody might have tried to predict it. I mean, there were a number of products before Grasshopper that were, you know, kind of pointing in that direction.

You know, nothing's made complete out

Evan Troxel: parametric design direction, is that what you're talking about?

Scott Davidson: Well, there's lots of different kinds of parametrics. You know, there's mechanical parametrics, there's uh, parametrics that are, um, you know, there are some where you'd, you know, have two points, and then you'd have a line between those two points, and then you'd, you know, you'd loft between those two lines, and you'd, you'd create the, you know, you'd move the, the, the, two points, and [00:41:00] then the line updates and the surface updates, you know, kind of this freeform kind of idea.

Um, there were, there's tools that use hyper, I call them a hypergraph, but hypergraph to edit sound, you know, it's a classic one early on. Um, there, there's a lot of different parametric ways. I mean, there's a lot of parametrics in Rhino. There's, uh, marine parametrics for hulls. There's jewelry parametrics that do rings.

There's, um, parametrics that do architecture, right? Visual art, for instance. There's parametrics that do bridges in using grasshopper, for instance. That's a really classic one lately. And so, which kind of parametrics are we talking about? I think that's an important discussion is, you know, there's different parametric engines, and unfortunately, almost per customer, some parametric engines work really well for this set of customers and some other ones don't.

And, and so, you know, there's [00:42:00] solids parametrics, you know, ones that work on straight lines and arcs, for instance. As long as everything you do is a straight line and arc, that's great. Um, but when it gets more complex. Um, you know, how can you control that thing? Parametrically, um, grasshopper allows us to parametrically control a lot of different shapes.

Um, uh, you know, and so I think that that is the, uh, understanding of a lot of different parametric engines understand, and that's something we wrestle with. You know, people want this parametric and r on that parametric and r on. Most of the time you see that with plugins. Right? So, depending on the kinds of parametrics you want to use, then you

can, can, can use those things.

Um, or you can plug those things in, or you can integrate them into those products. If you want architectural parametrics, use Revit. Right? But use Rhino inside Revit, if you wanted the [00:43:00] freeform stuff. Grasshopper running in Revit, that's cool. You want to do, um, bridge parametrics? Um, you know, have it go into Trimble Quadri, right?

Which is a, kind of a BIM bridge linear parametric system. Um, which you have a Rhino in sight for that. Um, you know, and that's one of the things I think that's fascinating here is that Now, can we actually start to integrate these different Modeling types and together, right, because now we have modern languages that we can actually integrate applications inside each other,

you know, and, and try to get them all to work together.

And that, that's been really fascinating the last few years. Um, been super successful. You know, how would you like to have Grasshopper inside Tecla? And so, but you've got to write all these components. Tecla, smart Tecla components, right? So that they can fire into there [00:44:00]

all they want. Um, and, and that's been another fascinating experiment.

Let's call it,

Evan Troxel: Before we talk about interoperability, because I think it falls kind of in that category, I want to go back and just talk about some, and I think this has to do with RhinoScript, but correct me if I'm wrong, but Let's talk about paneling tools.

Scott Davidson: Yes.

Evan Troxel: was, to me, like, that was the first real So there was a third, there was another application that I was using on the Mac at the time, I think it, was called Gem.

Do you remember Gem?

Scott Davidson: I remember the name.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, it was, it was, I mean, it was, it was parametrically driven, three dimensional geometry, and you could do patterning. pattern based stuff, and I

Scott Davidson: And it was good at patterning. Yeah,

yeah,

Evan Troxel: and then, and then when I saw

Paneling Tools, I mean, that, that to me really, like, it spoke the same language to me as an architect, thinking, oh, I, I understand what that means.

I mean, talk about that, because it's still, it's still there, right? I mean, I think that's what's so interesting about Rhino too, is like, it never forgets anything. You still [00:45:00] have all this stuff. From all the years and, and people have moved on to other things, but these other things are still there. Right.

And they're, they live it. They live inside there.

Scott Davidson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so, Paneling tools, I mean, paneling tools was, it was, it was really a response to people trying to do facades, obviously. Mm hmm. um, in architecture and having these really big surfaces, of course, but ultimately in the architecture world, everything pretty much has to be cooked down to some sort of straight line, right, because that's how our stock comes.

Um, and so, so Raja was the one that did that, um, and, and you know, how do you get a structure, a grid structure that you can use. But, but as we started to, and this is interesting, we, you initially idealized, Um, a strategy like this, how, how, you know, ideally, this surface has the right UV, you know, it's structured a certain way, so you just have to break it down UV wise, and then magically, you know, it just happens to fit the

[00:46:00] thing.

Evan Troxel: populate it. Yeah, that's

Scott Davidson: I just populate it. As long as the surface was built correctly, you know, that's always the key. Then the rest will just take care of itself. And, and, this is actually a good example of how we develop things. So, you know, of course that's the first place you're going to go. You've got this ideal surface, you're going to hit it, you're going to get this grid, you know, and you do whatever you want with it.

And then of course, you know, not two days later after you let it out, somebody comes back and says, Well, I got the shape that looks like this,

Evan Troxel: What about this edge condition,

Scott Davidson: Right, and the UV's are going this way, and the other ones are going that way, you know, and it's

all this. And I want the, I

want this, I want these things to come down here, you know.

And you have two choices, right? You either say, well, okay, obviously UV's not going to work. Or, I could force the customer and say, hey, you've got to create a better surface. Which is essentially telling them they've got to change the shape. Right? We

can't do that shape. Right? But, no, what we do is, okay, how do we do this one?

Well, okay, on this one, vertically, you know, we're just going to slice it [00:47:00] vertically, and then horizontally, we've got to break it up by points or something, you know, whatever it is. And then, you know, so we have these ten or twelve different ways where you can combine how we're slicing it this way and how we're doing it that way, and then we've got to figure out how to, you know, how you can walk yourself across that so you can make a grid and have index points.

That's actually a really good example where Just based on customers trying to do stuff, the thing gets more and more robust. Sometimes, unfortunately, also more complex. But more and more robust. To do these crazy stuff. Just these crazy, crazy things. And, and, what's great is, now, when somebody gets a hold of us and says, How do I do this?

You know, you can say, Hey, you know, here's the tool, here's paneling tools. And then you get to see all the things that, that are resulted from that. And that, that actually drives us. That's actually, it goes back to the same thing. We just love to see what people do with this thing.

Evan Troxel: Hey everyone, let's take a quick break from the conversation to pay [00:48:00] some bills around here. This episode of TRXL is brought to you by TRXL+ members. That's right, my incredible paid supporter members are making this episode possible. Their direct support ensures that I can continue exploring the intersection of architecture, technology, and the future of design with the leading voices in our industry directly to you. So let's talk about why you might consider financially supporting the podcast to o by becoming a TRXL+ supporter, you're not just helping sustain these conversations. You're also gaining exclusive benefits like ad free episodes of the show and my Leadership Edge email newsletter where I analyze episodes and deliver the insights and key takeaways right into your inbox. Your small contribution makes a huge impact.

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I had an, uh, a lovely conversation with Raja, at AU one year, just sitting at a table breakfast. Oh, Hey, what, you know, I didn't know who she was when I sat down next to her. And by the end of it, I knew exactly who she was. I, I, it wasn't, it was a moment and I'm like, Oh, you're, you're

Scott Davidson: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Raja Raja Issa. Yes. Yeah.

She's amazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Evan Troxel: So,

shout out to Raja for

Scott Davidson: Yeah, yeah. definitely, definitely. So, well,

Evan Troxel: let's talk, uh, Rhino 5. You introduced Rhino for the Mac at that point, I think. Was that when it first started, or was it 4?

Scott Davidson: no, it was five.

[00:50:00] It was five.

Evan Troxel: And it was different. I mean, it was different. It wasn't, it wasn't Windows Rhino, it was Mac Rhino. And it

Scott Davidson: No, yeah,

yeah.

Evan Troxel: What drove you guys to do that? Was it, was it customers asking for that, or was it, you felt like you needed to be there?

Scott Davidson: I think that, I think that, that, I mean, that's a, that's a really difficult one to figure out what drove us there. Um, I think Part of it was, you know, students, we have a very, very strong student program. Um, you know, our product, you know, students can buy it at a very inexpensive price and they can use it commercially.

Right? They can use it

after they graduate and all that stuff. Um, and there were a lot of students that had Macs, so they couldn't, they couldn't access Rhino, even though they wanted to. And, um, And so we kind of wanted to see if that, they'd use Brino for Mac, even if it was a, [00:51:00] uh, a version that wasn't at all as mature as the Windows version, you know, cause five, the five version was different in a lot of different ways.

And there are a lot of things,

Evan Troxel: didn't have all the features. The interface was different.

Scott Davidson: right?

Evan Troxel: Did it even have Grasshopper in the beginning? No.

Scott Davidson: Nope, Nope, Nope, Nope. And, and so, and it's a real debate. When you do, when you do cross platform, do you, How do you do that? Like, do you, do you make it like Windows on the Mac or do you make it them both native? Like they would be, right? Like you make the Mac version, like the Mac version, the Windows version, like the Windows version.

Um, you know, or, and, and so in Rhino 5, it was different. Rhino 6 was different, but it was better. Rhino 7, we got to the point where we could. It wasn't exactly the same, but we could at least release the codebase at the same day, so it was kind of getting to the same [00:52:00] codebase. Rhino 8, um, there's even more that's working, you know, Grasshopper does work.

Um, some Grasshopper plugins work, not all Grasshopper plugins work. Um, but, but there's a lot of, of, almost everything that you can do on the Windows version you can do on the Mac version. Um, Now what's interesting though is in 8, we're actually seeing the Mac version affect the Windows version. So we're seeing some cross platformness,

Evan Troxel: some influence

Scott Davidson: some influence coming from the other direction. And the way we write that now is we actually use the same code base for both. And the way you have to do that is we use an interface toolkit called Etto, who, Curtis, who works for us. develops that. It's open source, but he's the one that develops that. And, and so you, you actually write to Etto, and Etto's the one that kind of manages how, [00:53:00] how it shows in Windows and how you show in Mac.

Um, and it's not that everything, I mean, it's, you know, say it's 90 percent the same now. Um, it really helped a lot when Mac came out with some much stronger silicon. So So that's helped a lot in the last few versions. I mean,

the video, video performance has been so much better.

Evan Troxel: Oh yeah, the, the, real time rendering is,

Scott Davidson: yeah, yeah.

just

Evan Troxel: That was a big deal. All of a sudden, you turn that on, it's like, Whoa, this is way better.

Scott Davidson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so, and so that's, that's helped a lot with the Macs. Um, you know, I would say, you know, probably half our developers now are just actually develop on the Mac. Um, cause you can, You can actually develop for both platforms now, one spot. So that, that is something that's, that's moved forward a lot.

We intend to continue to to do that. Um, so,

Evan Troxel: One of the things that you guys did that was so good, I mean, just from a laptop [00:54:00] standpoint, because so many people are on, everybody's on a laptop, let's just say that, general, we'll generalize.

But man, the trackpad support on the Mac version of Rhino is, has always been just absolutely perfect. It's just like totally natural to be in a 3D environment without a mouse on the trackpad.

It's, it's, uh, it's just chef's kiss.

Scott Davidson: Well, I appreciate, we appreciate that, and thank you. The frustrating part for us is we can't do the same on Windows.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, I bet. I bet.

Scott Davidson: You know, cause the, the, it's a different, yeah, exactly, exactly. And it's just, it's just difficult, um, to, cause they don't have exactly the same, Messaging, you know, event messaging that the Mac site does have.

Um, but yeah, that's, that's an area that, that we've worked hard on. And all of this stuff, I mean all of the, just, going cross platform has been, been, a journey. It actually makes our code better, because you, you don't cheat, you can't cheat for Windows because it [00:55:00] won't work on Mac, and you can't cheat in Mac because it won't work for Windows.

Um, Some people call that cheat, some people call that a hack, whatever you want to call it, but it does keep us a little more honest, um, in terms of, of, of that. Um, in Rhino 8, um, all the development tools, you know, the script editor and all that stuff, they're at the same on Mac and Windows now, which is really great.

Um, and so, you know, we continue to try to make those two platforms equal. Um, license wise, you know, if you buy one, you can run it on the Mac or Windows, or both, so. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: So, so let's talk a little bit before we, we move on out of the Apple ecosystem to iOS apps. You do have iRhino 3D running on iOS, which includes iPhones and iPads. And

Scott Davidson: That's

Evan Troxel: there, there's some really cool features if you're on the test flight version of those. If you're not on the test flight version, you should be, and it's free to do so.

And, uh, but if you wanted [00:56:00] to do use, uh, Apple's, uh, What is it? What do they call it? Room kit or room plan. or something like that.

Scott Davidson: Room plan. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: can actually scan spaces and it builds native Rhino 3D models out of that, which is super cool with dimensions and, um, you can scan objects using the, uh, what's it?

AR kit or, you know, It's basically using the LiDAR cameras on the phone. And so there's a lot of really cool little features in there that you guys are, I'm sure there's some kind of influence even there with, with like prototyping some things on Apple's metal, with their metal APIs and, and, uh, you know, testing these kind of new technologies with scanning and capturing and all these and, and, um, I,

Scott Davidson: Yeah,

It's all been kind of a linear, uh, linear process. work for us, you know, so, so, Mac came out with, you know, they're going with Metal for their graphics engine, and, and, and that, we had to do that for Rhino, for Mac, for 8. And, and then the [00:57:00] iOS came, you know, development started, and that's actually the same code that we run for Mac and Windows, actually, is on iOS, it's just not all of it's turned on.

And, and that's yet a third platform. And, and so, yeah, we, we tapped into, and this is probably because it's just fun, we tapped into some of those tools that come on iOS that don't exist other places, like the AR, like the, the scanning, um, and, and, and those change, you know, Apple's come and gone with that, those technologies a little bit.

We had an older version of iRhino that we wrote, and it was really just a viewer, And that, of course, has been obliterated, and we have this new one, which, like you're saying, the, the test flight version is, is the place to be, because that's where we're adding new things, and Morteza, who does that. We're always adding, you know, new features, and trying to figure out, you know, how do we navigate, how do we, you know, [00:58:00] look through layers, how do we deal with views, you know.

Evan Troxel: you can, even build a few shapes in there now, I think, right,

Scott Davidson: Yes, you can, right,

Evan Troxel: model on your

Scott Davidson: a little bit, you know. Yeah,

a little bit. I mean, that, that scanning technology is by far the best way to use it, um, in terms of generating models, you

know, because it's so fast. Um, but, um, yeah, you can do a little bit of modeling, you know, and, and, and so we're trying to figure out again, trying to just follow what people are doing with it, what they're trying, um, and TestFlight's the place where that happens.

And, and, and really kind of working through, you know, what people are going to use this for. And how it complements their, their workflows, you know, you can mark up things, you

can, you know, you can kind of do your marks ups and that saves with the 3DM file and, and all of those things. And so we continue to kind of work through what that's going to mean.[00:59:00]

Evan Troxel: Very

Scott Davidson: uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So.

Evan Troxel: Well, let's talk interoperability and let's talk about your, your Trojan horse strategy that you've, you'd pulled out on everybody. I think we talked about this a little bit on the, on the podcast before, but let's let's, since we're telling the Rhino story here, where did Revit fit into this? Uh, how did all that happen with Rhino inside?

Scott Davidson: So, Rhino Inside was our, you know, the ability to pull Rhino apart so we could load it other places. And, you know, the iOS, you could actually call that part of that too. Um, but, but, he'd So, so we could load it inside other applications and, and the idea was originally just like you could make your own application and you could pull Rhino, you could use the Rhino functionality in there.

Um, and somebody just thought, well, I wonder what it would run in Revit and just for fun and then they tried it and of course it worked. That was Kike. And, and one of the big, you know, we [01:00:00] talked about architects using Rhino. One of the big requests we always get is. Or it used to get more, but now we, um, so how do I get my Rhino information into Revit, right?

Wanna use, I, you know, we're gonna use these two products together. We talked about Rhino always being a companion to, to other processes. And so how do we get that information back and forth? And you can try to use file formats. Um, the problem with file formats is you're gonna lose something. It's gonna format information in a certain way and.

And it's going to put it in the other application in a different, you know, in a different way, maybe in a different way you want. Um, and so, one of the things about Rhino inside Revit, which was, you know, we can now use Grasshopper to take the geometry and the information out of Rhino and rearrange it in a way that's Revit friendly.

And, and so you can. You know, take [01:01:00] these and you can categorize them the way you want, and you can create native Revit objects if you want, however you want to do that. And then you, you know, you push all that stuff in there with all the right parameters. Or you can grab all the parameters from over here and throw them into Rhino so you can remember what it all means.

So, anyway, push it back and forth. And so, it bypassed these pre cut file formats. I mean, you know that, that people, a lot of times they use Excel, right? So they, they, they take Grasshopper, they take Python or something, and they write all these points to an Excel spreadsheet and they take, I don't know, Dynamo or Python or something in Revit, and they'd read all that stuff trying to, and so as long as you

could translate everything, that's right. As long as, and everything translated to a point, right? You know, a point in Excel. Um, Anyway, we could bypass all that by saying, okay, we know the Rhino information cause we're sitting in Rhino grasshoppers [01:02:00] can, you know, be the, to wire everything together, push it into Revit or take stuff out of Revit and use that as a reference and throw it back in.

Um, and that has been huge in terms of, of bypassing the weaknesses of file formats.

Evan Troxel: I think, I think the podcast we did before, the title of it was, File Formats Are Terrible, if I

Scott Davidson: Yes. Or dead. Or something. Yes.

Evan Troxel: it was this idea that you're talking about, it's like, Skip the files completely and just let them talk to each other. What year did that project start?

Scott Davidson: Oh, I

want to say that was probably COVID. So, maybe right before COVID. It's hard

Evan Troxel: think It was before, yeah,

Scott Davidson: It was just, just before COVID.

Yeah. COVID

Evan Troxel: And, and it's grown as well, right? It started, it started with, with a certain number of functions that you could do inside, you know, that, that, talk about like

Scott Davidson: Yeah, so, so we

Evan Troxel: that, [01:03:00] again user driven?

Scott Davidson: oh yeah, oh

yeah, I

mean before it was, you know, let's make some direct shapes, right? Alright, we must be done, you know, it's like, no, we'd really like you to make columns and walls.

Evan Troxel: remember when you guys published your documents, right, on how to use it. And I'm like, oh man, this, this website is going to need to be updated every single day.

Scott Davidson: that's correct. that's correct. And I mean, it's getting longer and longer and bigger and bigger. And it's like, Oh my, I mean, we actually had to invent what we call pass through components, right? Cause in Grasshopper before you'd have components that input and it would make something and you'd have a different component that would take something and then output it, you know, like simple version, right?

Is I've got three coordinates, make a point. And then I have this other one, this other component that takes a point and it'll make three coordinates. Well we decided if we had to do that we'd have twice as many components. So now

we, in Revit, and this is actually true in Grasshopper in general, but now we have them where you've got the three over, [01:04:00] you've got the point going in plus the three coordinates and you've got the point going out plus the three coordinates.

And if you feed a point in you'll get the three coordinates out and if you feed into the three coordinates you get the one point out. But it's one component that

will do both at the same time.

You can do interesting things like bring the point in and only feed the Y and it will just change the Y value of that point going through, kind of thing.

Evan Troxel: Nice.

Scott Davidson: Um, but that, you know, we had to figure out how are we going to do this with all these Revit components now that we have to add to Grasshopper as a plug in, right? You can install it, it's free, but not everybody gets to see them. but if you have Revit floating around, you can throw it in there. But now also, you know, we have Rhino Inside Tecla, which has been really popular.

Rhino Inside Quadri, um, there's experiments with, uh, Rhino Inside, uh, Blender, Rhino Inside SketchUp, Rhino, you know, there's, there's a lot of different ones. The main ones, the main three are the, the Revit, [01:05:00] the Tecla and the Quadri one. Um, and those have been. really popular. Rhino Insights, uh, Sophistic is another one.

Um, so there's a lot of different insight projects that are happening. Um, yeah,

Evan Troxel: through outside developers who are, who can really put their knowledge and passion into those projects?

Scott Davidson: a good example is the Rhino Insights Tecla ones done by a Tecla developer, like

done by Trimble or like they're actually doing it. And, and part of the reason for that is you really have to understand you to do this. You have to be, have intimate knowledge of both SDKs. And, and that's, you know, we happen to have somebody that knew the Revit SDK, but, but, um, these other ones we don't, we don't understand their SDKs, so, so, it's, it's really helpful that they're doing it, um, in fact it's the only way it works.

Although we work with them really hard if there's something that's [01:06:00] confusing or doesn't work very well, of course we try to solve it, but, um, I think that inside technology, it continues to be an interesting frontier. Um, and, and it's not, I don't still don't see it a lot around, you

know, I don't see other, other products doing that yet.

Evan Troxel: yeah,

Scott Davidson: So,

Evan Troxel: Well, you talked about how Revit kind of influenced the development of certain components in Grasshopper. Are, what other modeling tools have influenced what you guys have done maybe more recently? Do you, can you think of any examples? Mm hmm.

Scott Davidson: Well,

Evan Troxel: particular, so I'm kind of testing

Scott Davidson: all right. I'll let you tell me what you're

thinking about. I don't

Evan Troxel: push

Scott Davidson: a hole on that.

Oh yeah, so push pull is a good example, right? So push pull is, is, is a, yeah, I mean, sure, it was, it was, uh, an interface kind of explored through SketchUp, right? And, uh, [01:07:00] and, you know, proven to be useful,

so.

Evan Troxel: very proven, right?

Scott Davidson: Right. I mean, yeah, super

proven. I mean, Gumball, Gumball, Gumball is the same thing,

right? So Gumball's been shown, I mean, countless applications have Gumballs. And, you know, for us, we were just a little slow on the get up, um, for that. Uh, uh, so yeah, there's definitely, I mean, and part of, but part of it is it's not, and we, like, we really don't like it when the customer comes to us and says, can't you just make it look like Gumball?

work like XYZ. Right. That, that doesn't work for us.

Evan Troxel: yeah, And I think you guys proved that with Push Pull, like you, you made it, you made it a very Rhino version of

Scott Davidson: yeah, different,

different, but, but, but the, the, the, you know, a lot of times customers are like, I do this over here,

right? This is, you know, I, this, I know this works for the workflow I'm trying to shoot for, you know, [01:08:00] How can we do that over, how can we make it easier in Rhino to do this side to the other thing?

And, and, and so, there's a cross, you know, there's always a little bit of crossover in that, in that. Um, you know, that it's not, it's not that we're just trying to do, it's just that customers sometimes say, Hey, here's workflows that work pretty well.

Um, and, and then we, we go from there. And, uh, we tried to do it in a very Rhino way, so they're always a little different.

But,

Evan Troxel: Yeah, I think, uh, one of the videos I saw that you had published was like, how to build a table using only the gumball, Right?

It was like, anybody who's experienced in Rhino would never do it like that. But somebody who's coming from somewhere else might be like, you just unlocked Rhino for me when they see something like that.

Scott Davidson: Yeah, and, and, you know, some tables work really well done, done that way. You know, other tables don't work

very well at all.

Evan Troxel: True. [01:09:00]

Scott Davidson: Um, but, but, and, and, and it's true too, like, we talked about Rhinos, Meshes, and SubDs, and NURBS. You know, both the surfaces and solids. And so how do you get That technology to work with all three of those geometry types, right?

And, and it's hard. I mean, it doesn't always work the same. You know, pushing and pulling on a, on a sub D face is different than pushing and pulling, you know,

on a NURBS thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, a lot of experimentation, um, a lot of getting it out and rewriting it when it

doesn't

Evan Troxel: of failing,

Scott Davidson: Yeah, a lot of failing along the way.

Yeah,

yeah,

yeah. Well, we always like to say, if you haven't rewritten it three times, you know, there's still another rewrite coming up. Don't know when it's going to get to you, but it's going to get there. So, yeah,

Evan Troxel: forgets anything, right? It's like, you're very, uh, like you have all these tools, you've just continued to build and build and build and build [01:10:00] and you maybe ever had to rewrite things and some things get just kind of shoved off into the corner because not very many people use them still, but they're still there.

I'm just thinking about like the overall UI and just the way you use Rhino, a user with the way they use it. I'm sure, I'm sure lots of people customize it and make it look how they want. But like the underlying, like if you just default open this thing up, you've got the command line, you've got a, you've got a graphical UI, you've got a command line UI.

And you've got these shortcuts, right? The commands themselves, right? And the keyboard driven. Like that, that goes all the way back to the beginning. Right? And you can never take that away because your user base will scream. Right? Like you can't, you can't shift the paradigm of Rhino and release it as Rhino.

You would have to come out with an entirely new product to do that. But, kind of talk about, like from, This to me seems very McNeil. Like, you've talked about you're this private company, you're small on purpose, [01:11:00] you've always thought of yourself as a companion app, you've, you've kept all this stuff in Rhino all these years, the way that people use it hasn't really changed.

That just seems to be the ethos of McNeil and Associates and the Rhinoceros 3D application.

Scott Davidson: Well, yeah. And you've, I mean, it's, it's, it's both a good thing and a bad thing. Right. So, you know, we have so many customers now that when we start to change things, right. You know, you've got people that say, yeah, I've been doing this for 15 years like this. You know, why did you change that? Hopefully the way we changed it allows us to build more, right?

So, one of the struggles, one of the challenges that we have now is, is a lot of times in order to move an area of the product forward you have to be able to rewrite it. You have to write it. in a more modern way. You have to write it, you know, because now, you know, you realize what it is, but it needs to, you know, what needs to be more.

And that's a real [01:12:00] challenge is how do you grab parts of it and and rewrite it so that you can move it forward in that new direction. You know, that technology is not old. It's not, you know, hasn't been kind of stretched and hacked enough. And, and I have to say that, that I've been really proud of our team in that they've been willing to take that risk in a few areas and not that it's always gone perfectly, but we are in a process of, we will rip out a piece and we'll put something new in.

and, and try to make that work. Sometimes that is a necessity. Sometimes it's by our choice. We'll go through that pain. Um, but how do we keep that? How do we keep this product fresh and the, and the platform? How do you keep the platform fresh after 30 years?

Evan Troxel: Mm hmm.

Scott Davidson: Right? How do you, how do you keep, you know, this moving forward?

Um, And, [01:13:00] and without, because there's a lot of products that have essentially atrophied,

um, and, and it's very easy to do, um, there's a lot of, a lot of terms for that, um, but, but it's, it's something that, it's, it is risky, I mean, writing software is a, is a risky proposition, um, you know, we're writing software hoping somebody will upgrade to it later,

um, and, and, you know, Trying to rewrite something, um, to make it better means you're going to make it different.

And in making it different, not everybody's always super excited about

Evan Troxel: They're not along for the ride necessarily, right?

Scott Davidson: well, and,

Evan Troxel: they vote with their dollars, right? I

Scott Davidson: yeah,

exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, and, and, but it's, it is, I have to say that that, and you're hitting right on something as, as these products get older, um, It's a real challenge to, how do we [01:14:00] continue to keep it fresh, but, but respect all our existing customer base.

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Scott Davidson: Right? Because they want it to improve too. I mean, everybody wants this to get better. Right? It's just that sometimes that's a little hard to do with the existing technology base, so. So we've done a good job. I mean, we're a small company, so we can take those risks a little bit. and it's been really good.

Um, but we, and we have some people that are working really hard to, to try to, excuse me, replace the right pieces of the product. Um, we didn't think we'd be doing this for 30 years, so we didn't quite plan for this. I mean, come on.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Scott Davidson: So

yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean that, that's the mind blowing part. I think is we're still here.

Evan Troxel: Staying power.

Scott Davidson: The, yeah, the staying power and it's still exciting. I mean it still feels just like it did Three years into it or one year into it or whatever, [01:15:00] you know, and and and so that's that's really cool

Evan Troxel: That would have been a great last line, but I'm not going to let you off the hook yet.

Scott Davidson: Oh

Evan Troxel: Well, tell me about pricing and perpetual licensing and, and like your company's stance on all that, because this is another part of the story that I think, I mean, you have customers who are so loyal and are so rooting for you. Uh, and I think this is a part of that story. It's not, it's not all about the money.

It's a lot, it's a lot of the whole recipe that you guys have haphazardly thrown together here, right?

Scott Davidson: Yeah

Evan Troxel: Like, it's just happened the way that it's, it's really organic, you know? And, but, but, but you definitely have some really strongly held beliefs that underlie the way you do business.

Scott Davidson: Yeah, so You know, I mean, a big part of, [01:16:00] you know, we, we, we charge less for the product than, than a lot of other products cost. And there's a lot of reasons for that. Um, one of the reasons is that we think of ourselves as a companion product, right? So, there might be a lot of money on the table, but, you know, we don't want all that money because you can't buy other products and you'd have to figure out how to use only Rhino by itself.

Um, but the, the, you know, we're a private company, so we can run things a little bit differently. So, for instance, we don't do a lot of marketing, and we hope that people realize that we pass that on to the customer. So, you know, so we can keep that that price down. Students, a lot of innovation in, in workflows with students.

Um, in fact, I would say most innovation in 3d workflows come from students ultimately, right? Cause they're the ones that actually have time to experiment, get them a, you know, give them a break on the price so that [01:17:00] they can get to it. Can,

Evan Troxel: And they're not coming in with all those preconceived, this is the way I've always done it

Scott Davidson: Well, yeah, yeah. Or, and, and they don't, they're not sitting there on an hourly, per hour basis, trying to get a project done, you know, they can experiment, they can, you know, they're talented, they have fresh ideas, you know, and, and they, and

they do,

Evan Troxel: influences

Scott Davidson: very different influences and so,

so, you know, that's a, that's an area that, that, that is part of the thing.

Now, now, in terms of perpetual license versus, um, subscription, I guess you'd have to call it, um, I mean, that's what most people call it, is, I think that is really just us being defiant. Right? That, that, I mean, it has everything to do with because we can, because we don't have to go to subscription because we can.

That doesn't mean we never will. It doesn't mean, you know, if, if customers, if there are, and there are actually certain customers that want us to go to subscription [01:18:00] because for instance, they can, um, you know, pay us the same amount all the time. Um, but generally we find that, that. The majority of our customers, you know, they don't want us to go to subscriptions.

So, so we don't. And, and, and there is a freedom to that. You know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of reasons companies go to subscriptions. We don't have those reasons. So, and so, I mean, pretty much because we can. Um,

Evan Troxel: to your point earlier, you have to then develop before collecting, right? You have to do all of that work In hope of

Scott Davidson: In

hope of Yes, it, yeah. Software game is a game of gambling, right? You do all the work and then you try to collect the money

and you, and you hope that the work you've done now, you know, will, will. You know, people will appreciate it and they, [01:19:00] they, you know, the thank you note is, is paying us for the work we've done.

Um, so it's always, it's constantly a gamble. Um, a lot of. A lot of people don't think about it that way, but, but in fact, you're always, you know, you're always working for the next thing. It's part of the reason that we have such an open beta program. You know,

Evan Troxel: Yeah, I wanted

Scott Davidson: like, like, today, like today, you can get Rhino 9, right?

If you own Rhino 8, you can download Rhino 9. Not that there's much in Rhino 9 beyond what's in Rhino 8, but there are a few things. You know, and we release that every week. And it's essentially we release it every week because we want customers saying, yeah, you're still, you're still on the, you're still on the right path.

You're still on the right path.

Evan Troxel: there's accountability there. I mean, you're showing your work. I mean, you are, you are literally developing in the open, in the public,

Scott Davidson: And,

Evan Troxel: run it this way. I'm, I'm really curious about this whole

Scott Davidson: yeah, yeah, yeah. yeah. And, and, and you, and you have to allow yourself to do that. So you [01:20:00] can't plan very far. You can't, you know, you've got to have developers that are willing to talk to customers. I mean, there's a thousand different ways you have to set up the company so that, so that you can get this interaction.

You know, it's not like we have four months of plans and, oh, thanks for the request, but you have to wait four months. , right? Because I've got this long list of stuff I have to do. Now, of course, sometimes they might say, yeah, that's gonna take, you know, a year , you know, there's not

no question

Evan Troxel: Work sessions on the Mac. Come on. It's been a cut.

Scott Davidson: Exactly. Great example, great example, right? I mean, there's a thousand, thousand things that, thousands and thousands of things that we can't get to. But, But, but, the, the, um. but that is a good example where we're kind of trying to keep ourselves understanding what is really a value. What is really the valuable piece here?

I mean, we can make up stories [01:21:00] internally and we do quickly because most of the time those are out the window in a week because you, you know, you're kind of marching along little tiny pieces. So we almost always now, in fact, probably two months after we came out with eight, we came out with a nine beta that you can download.

You can run it on

Evan Troxel: it the right thing. You got to call it, The whip, right? This is

Scott Davidson: Yeah, it's currently the way.

So, and it's a good example, I don't know if we should go over that term because it might be useful, but work in progress is when we're adding new technology and who knows how well or poor it's going to work. And at some point, we'll go, and this will be quite a while, right?

Because we only come out with stuff every three years or so, new versions, a couple years, two, three years, something like that. Um. When we go, when all the new technology is in there, but, you know, we need to fix bugs, refine UI, integrate it with other things that maybe it affected.

That's when we go to, [01:22:00] yeah, yeah,

It might be creating a UI cause we currently use command line for it or something. Um, then we'll go to what we call beta, right? And hopefully beta is, is that process of, of. of refining it a little bit, fixing the bugs, documenting it.

Evan Troxel: But you're not trying to add anything new at that point. Like, it's locked of the feature set for the most part.

Scott Davidson: We'd like to kid

ourselves that's,

Evan Troxel: let's

Scott Davidson: right. Yeah, yeah,

let's just, let's just say ideally,

Evan Troxel: that you want out there, right?

Scott Davidson: that's right, that's the story we want out there. Um, yeah, as long as we didn't forget some really fundamental,

you know, something obvious, that, that we missed. Um, but, but then, so yeah, so we have the work in progress for nine.

Yeah, out there. And then we were working along with that. And, and so people have both eight and nine on their computer and they do their work with eight. And if

they need something in nine, yeah, they play a nine. Or I might jump in and use one [01:23:00] function and then bring it back. That works. Um, but

that's

Evan Troxel: recommend it for production work for very, for

Scott Davidson: especially right now,

right?

Cause it's Early.

Um, once you get to beta, you're a little safer. Um, but, but the, But that's, that's, I mean, how we have to work. I mean, that Rhino 9 is the way currently you work with our, our devs. I mean, it's not, and that this is actually internally, you know, always a balance. Like when do we fix things in eight?

Cause they're a bug. We have to fix those first. And then, then you take the time to add something to nine. Right. And

everybody's doing it.

Evan Troxel: people comfortable with production in eight, right? As

Scott Davidson: Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, No, I mean, you're still working on that, but you still have to be pushing nine out a little bit. And,

you know, there's certain things you're like, I don't know how well this is going to work.

So you got to throw that in nine so it can get beat on so that the people that are trying to get production work done in eight don't get

interrupted.

Evan Troxel: So an example of this was [01:24:00] like in 7, Right. 7 was the model that was the real version, and then you had the 8 whip, which was really pushing sub D's, I think. Is that when it, is

Scott Davidson: No, that was six to

seven, six,

Evan Troxel: So, so Yeah.

you would jump over to seven. You'd have them both installed again. I like how you guys have set this up.

You've structured it so that you've got to have a bit of skin in the game, Right.

As a customer to be current with the latest release. Version number, the big number, 8, 7, whatever it is, but then when you do that, you, you also have the option to play with the work in progress. And like you said, new technology that's being added in there, Right. And so I'd go over there and, and. You know, in the beginning it was, it was all command line sub D stuff, Right. And then you, you added interface and you added more commands and people on the forums are like, Hey, really need this thing. I've been using this in Maya forever or whatever. And I I need to be able to, you know flip the edges or [01:25:00] crease this or whatever, you know, add weights, whatever those things are for sub Ds.

And you slowly see those things happen. And then when ACE8 comes out, it's got a pretty decent first round of sub D tools. Seven. Sorry, I keep saying the wrong number, but,

but like, That's how it works. right. And so you can actively participate in the development of that next release while being, you know, doing production work in the main stable version, which is One one number less.

Scott Davidson: One number less. And that's, that's, and that's critical. That's critical to the way we do, and what Rhino is. And participating in that, In that web process is, you really can have a lot of influence on where the tool's going. Um, and I'd always highly recommend people, um, at least get that on their computer and play around with it.

I, just for fun, I've been playing around just the last couple days with, um, using Grasshopper as a hatch pattern generator.

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Scott Davidson: And, uh, [01:26:00] and, and so we put a bunch of tools, a bunch of components in Rhino 9 to generate hatch patterns in, in multiple different ways. You can imagine with Grasshopper, there's a lot of really cool ways to do it.

Clean ones, difficult ones. And, and, but you know, now you've got all these little components and you know, you can flip a couple numbers up here and you generate all these different hatch patterns.

Um, yeah, it's really, really kind of, kind of cool, but um, you know, it's taking some time to figure out exactly how those work together and we're doing that in the whip.

Um, right, because this component comes out and it kind of works, sort of works for all the things you'd think about, but then there's, you know, ten things people try on it that we didn't think about, you

know, now so we're changing that, um, so you can't count on that component being really consistent for the next two years, right?

I mean, obviously, let's say, four months from now, [01:27:00] that component probably won't change after that. But. But, you know, that's the kind of thing.

Now I'm getting work done on the meantime, and of course I'm getting work done with it in the meantime, but you just can't, you know, base a whole workflow for the

Evan Troxel: Fully depend on it.

Scott Davidson: Yeah,

on

that, that's, that's, what the, the, uh, the existing version, which is Rhino 8 currently, is to do. So, yeah.

Evan Troxel: Let's talk about Grasshopper two for a a minute here. So,

so I mean, this is gra I mean, what's crazy is you've had Grasshopper in Rhino since six, I think you said,

Scott Davidson: hmm.

Evan Troxel: and, and it's version one, right? Like it's one point something, but it's one, like it's still this original idea and, and so talk about where you're going with that.

Scott Davidson: Well, I, I think, I think, before we talk about two, we do need to talk about one. So, one is the same concept that it's always been, but we do continue to add

whole new

sets of components. You [01:28:00] know, in Rhino 8, we came out with this idea of content cache and being able to track objects in Rhino and being able to, to manipulate actual Rhino objects within Grasshopper's data types.

And that continues to push forward and really revolutionizes the way you can use Grasshopper in Rhino. And, and, and so Grasshopper 1 continues to be actively developed

and

Evan Troxel: that's by no means a, uh, a thing that's just coasting.

Not at all.

Scott Davidson: right, right. Now we have a set of, we have a crew of people working on that. And then Grasshopper 2 is a re imagination of now that we understand what Grasshopper is used for, how would you write Grasshopper

Evan Troxel: if you were gonna do it all again.

Scott Davidson: if you were to do it all again and, and, you know, approach it based on what that is. and so that's available.

You can download Grasshopper [01:29:00] too. Um, but, but David and David's doing a lot of that work. Um, I mean, he really allows him, he's allowing himself to really touch everything and rewrite everything and reorganize everything. And that takes some time. And, and

Evan Troxel: some new frontier there, right? I mean, so,

much has been learned and just like you've absorbed how people do things, things they aspire to do, and this re imagining, you know, the potential there just is, is enormous.

Scott Davidson: It is, and, and, and, you know, uh, development languages, I mean, now that we think about it itself as a development language, then, and development languages are becoming more and more sophisticated at a higher level.

And so, you know, for instance, and I know this isn't super new, but, you know, the idea of a class and a class template, and, and, you know, how does that now affect Grasshopper, [01:30:00] right?

How can you make an object, which is a piece of data, but it has other kind of members to it. And then as that flows through the deal, what do you do with that? How does that class morph and how does it, you know, adopt? And we don't call them classes, but, but, the, the, you know, just this idea of that sophisticated way of dealing with a data structure, you know, how, how could we integrate that into the system?

Um, and, and that's part of it. Um, there's some really amazing. Kind of technology surrounding passing a function down the, down the stream, down the pipe, instead of a piece of data. So it can be dynamic. Right, as opposed to just, you know, here's the value of this function, pass the value down. Let's

just pass the actual, the actual function down the

stream. And, and how does that affect all these other pieces? And that's something that, that David continues to, to [01:31:00] evolve with.

Evan Troxel: And, new

Scott Davidson: yep.

Evan Troxel: interface paradigms too, right? Like the way that you interact with it,

Scott Davidson: the way you interact with it the way it looks,

but the way you interact with it. And that's, that's always been something that, that I always felt like is really great about, you know, it's just how Grasshopper feels when you use it. You know, there's just, and, and, and Grasshopper does the same way. You know, just like, it's just sitting there and actually feeling your way through the technology as you're using it.

It's so key.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Scott Davidson: You know, You

get closer.

Evan Troxel: to use.

Scott Davidson: Yeah,

you get close enough to an input, it snaps to the right spot, you know, and you don't see it. I mean, you don't know, you notice it cause it feels right, but not, but, but that takes, I mean, to, to work your way through that. I mean, it takes a lot

of just,

Evan Troxel: the details

Scott Davidson: yeah, it's the

details.

And that's something that, that, that I think that, that has always been right with [01:32:00] Grasshopper, um, you know, to, to David's credit, if I haven't said his name enough today, but. you know,

Evan Troxel: Say it again, he might appear.

Scott Davidson: nah, yeah, he, he is truly amazing. And so, you know, kind of working your way through that. And, um, and so there's a lot of that going on with Grasshopper 2.

Like I said, you can get it. Um, you know, we are, we continue to look on trying to figure out how we're going to get all these technologies to attach to it. Um, but it's going to be a while. I mean, Grasshopper 1 is going to, you know, continue for a long, long time. In fact, Who knows, maybe forever. Grasshopper 2 is in parallel, it's not meant to replace.

Evan Troxel: in true Rhino fashion, right? You're, you're, you're not going to forget about. yeah.

And, and there's so many scripts out there that rely on, on one that are just going to, continue to be useful, right? And necessary that you, you're going to have to keep Grasshopper One around for,

Scott Davidson: Well,

Evan Troxel: let's just say forever.

Scott Davidson: we used to think, well, initially it thought [01:33:00] that we'd have to throw out all the Grasshopper 1 stuff, but David figured out how to run Grasshopper 1 components in Grasshopper 2. And so,

Evan Troxel: We call it Grasshopper Inside. Yeah.

Scott Davidson: It is! Actually, oddly enough, that's exactly the technology it is.

Evan Troxel: Nice.

Scott Davidson: you know that Rhino is Rhino Inside?

Evan Troxel: No,

Scott Davidson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you go look at, if you go look in the programming, in the program thing, Rhino. exe is this tiny little thing.

And RhinoCore. dll is this monstrous thing. Which is actually, that's what you load when you do Rhino Inside. So this little Rhino. exe thing actually runs Rhino Inside.

Evan Troxel: Oh, wow.

Scott Davidson: That's, uh, Rhino is itself Rhino inside. but, uh,

Evan Troxel: These feedback loops are, incredible. I mean,

Scott Davidson: They are, and if you think about them too hard,

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Scott Davidson: Yeah, I wouldn't, I would highly recommend not doing that, yes.

Evan Troxel: Okay, so,

let's finish up. Let's wrap up. I want to just, how, how have you been blown away by [01:34:00] your user base over the years? I, I'm sure there's a million ways, but, but like project wise, what people have been able to do with it.

There's got to be a, a story or two that you could just, you know, What, what, what like just comes to you immediately when I ask that? Because,

Scott Davidson: Okay, so,

Evan Troxel: I've, seen some stuff that I've just like, I bet the McNeil folks are, just completely blown away. I'm

Scott Davidson: We are, and every

Evan Troxel: guys are the, you guys are the parents of this

Scott Davidson: every every day, we are surprised. And it is like a child. Yeah. For those of you that are parents, it is like a child. It's like when they grow up and they start doing stuff and you are just like, Oh my goodness, I can't even imagine that they did that, right? They're obviously a little bit older and, you know, they've got this and that talent.

And so every day we're blown away by stuff. But my two, I mean one is because I'm an architect and, you know, was Sagrada Familia. So the Sagrada Familia in [01:35:00] Barcelona. Um, you know, it was destroyed, um, by the, the, in the Civil War, um, all the drawings were destroyed and a lot of the models that Gaudi had made, and this was actually really early on in the 90s, they started doing this at MIT in Australia, is, you know, a lot of what he did was mathematically driven, and so they started using Rhino to put this, put these shapes back together to try to figure out what the original was.

design was like and they ultimately modeled the whole thing in Rhino and they used that to actually create You know what they're doing out there

um, and we used to talk to the architects that were involved in that and and you know, that's such a beautiful building and

it's just and complex and and organic and mathematical at the same time and That project always has blown me away and continues to Yeah

Evan Troxel: Ticks All the boxes,

Scott Davidson: All the boxes [01:36:00] and it's, and it's Rhino, Rhino

modeled, you

Evan Troxel: Last time I was there was 1990. Well, the only time I was there was 1998. The entire. Interior was full of scaffolding at

Scott Davidson: yeah, now,

Evan Troxel: seen pictures of it now and it's just

Scott Davidson: and you go in the afternoon, afternoon when the sun's low, one side of the windows are warm reds and oranges and the other sides are blue and greens and that all this light comes in the space and it all mixed together in rainbow colors and it's just. Fascinating. Anyway,

that's, that's gotta be one of my favorite architectural places.

Although I, I, you know, there's so many of those, um, in the world that, that are just great. And, and I could go on forever for that. Um, and what was another one? Um, so, oh, the movies. So, [01:37:00] so many blockbusters that have computer graphics. In them, um, star Trek, star Wars, um, men in Black Lord of the Rings, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

All these things. A lot of times they have to create a computer graphic version of the objects, but then they have to make a physical object to interact with the actors. And that's the world of Rhino

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Scott Davidson: is because they can fabricate it for real, but they can do these weird, crazy, weird shapes and it's. It was always so much fun to, you know, walk on the set of Mission Impossible, you know, and you're walking around and, and I can talk about this now because of course the movies have been come and gone years ago, but, um, you know, you're kind of walking around.

First of all, you can't imagine you're in the middle of this and these people are wonderful and smart and creative. You know, we're just trying to, just lucky we're there. Anyway, you're sitting next to, uh, a set of stone [01:38:00] stairs and you're looking around and, and somebody comes by and just steps down and grabs those stairs and, and, and puts them over his shoulder and walks him down the thing.

And it's, and it's, it's like physically and psychologically it is surprising to you because Those were stone stairs. You were standing right next to them.

Evan Troxel: You just broke me.

Scott Davidson: Yeah, yeah. It's like, it's just your whole body goes, what just happened? Um, but, but go see all the, all that creativity and

see how it comes out in the movies and things like that.

That's, I mean, and we live vicariously through all these kinds of projects. I mean, it keeps us going.

Evan Troxel: I bet.

Scott Davidson: yeah, it's so much fun.

Evan Troxel: That's really cool.

Scott Davidson: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: yeah. I think about a, uh, a particular slide in a presentation from. friend of the show, Brian. Ringley. He's been on the show a few

Scott Davidson: Oh yeah.

Evan Troxel: And he was like, it was about visual programming. And, you know, it was like, here's what people think it [01:39:00] is. Right?

And it was, there's two columns and it was like making weird shapes.

Right. Well, that was like number one, right.

Scott Davidson: Right?

Evan Troxel: And it, and the, and what it, what it really is fabricatable. And, and it, because it's logic, right? I think that's what, what is so interesting about this approach to creation of, of physical objects, like you can imagine these things. If you can come up with a logical way to construct them, you can take that exact same information and make a physical thing out of

Scott Davidson: It

makes it possible.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Evan Troxel: And, that's just a great way to, to explain it to people who don't understand it or are coming to this for the first time. And it's like, there, there is this logic behind all of this. Like you said, like Gaudi's Sagrada Familia, it's, it was math based, right? and, so because it was, then you're able to build [01:40:00] these, these forms and so to describe them in three dimensions that can then be built, Right.

Scott Davidson: And, and, you know, I always like to say is, if, if what you're designing doesn't draw well in 2D, then use Rhino. Because you can get people the information they need to get it to build. Um, if, I mean, I remember good old days, right? You'd have the 24 by 36 sheet, and then you'd have this, this, this line going down the page like this, and every 6 inches, it's like, down 2 inches, over 4 and a half, down 3 inches, you know, and they're trying to, they're trying to, to give you all the dots

of that section, plot all the points, Now, the only thing I can tell you, if you take this curve. And you split it every six inches,

and then you take the points and try to put, make the curve. The only thing I can tell you is you're going to have a different curve,

than, than when you had it. But, we don't see that anymore. Now it's like, here's the curve, [01:41:00] you know, here's the 3D shape.

You figure out, you know, like, you use that data to figure out how your fabrication process can get to those points, and that, that shape. And, and, and definitely how, how, I, We do see that. It enables designers to be able to build those things that they can imagine.

Evan Troxel: Now that was the ending. That was great. Thank you so much for sharing this story today. This has been a lot of fun, and I learned a lot.

Scott Davidson: Well, thank you. So, I'd really appreciate your time anytime.

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