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Artisan Grasshopper

Getting started

Requirements

  • Rhino 8, on Windows or macOS. The plug-in is built against the Rhino 8 and Grasshopper 8 APIs; it does not load in Rhino 7 or earlier.
  • RhinoArtisan installed and licensed. The Grasshopper components share RhinoArtisan’s engine and read its asset library (profiles, gem data) from the RhinoArtisan folder, so they need it present.
  • A licence for Artisan for Grasshopper, which is separate from the RhinoArtisan Standard license and not included in it — talk to us about adding it.
  • Grasshopper, which comes with Rhino 8 — run the Grasshopper command to open it.

Install

Artisan for Grasshopper ships as ArtisanGrasshopper.gha plus the DLLs it depends on. All of them go in Grasshopper’s components folder, together.

  1. Close Rhino. Grasshopper loads plug-ins once at startup and will not pick up a file dropped in while it is running.
  2. Open the components folder. The reliable way to find it is from Grasshopper itself: File → Special Folders → Components Folder. Typically it is:
    • Windows — %APPDATA%\Grasshopper\Libraries
    • macOS — ~/Library/Application Support/McNeel/Rhinoceros/8.0/Plug-ins/Grasshopper (<id>)/Libraries
  3. Copy in the whole payload — the .gha and every file shipped alongside it. A missing dependency is the usual reason the tabs do not appear.
  4. On Windows, unblock the files. Anything downloaded from the internet is blocked by default and will silently fail to load. Right-click each file → Properties → tick Unblock → OK.
  5. Start Rhino and run Grasshopper. Six new tabs appear at the end of the ribbon: Artisan, Gems, Gemset, Shanks, Accessories, Readers.

Your first ring

A shank builder is the shortest path to geometry, because every one of its inputs is optional. Drop a Classic component (Shanks › Classic) on the canvas and it already produces a ring using the plug-in’s default profiles.

From there, three steps make it parametric:

  1. Set a finger size. Drop a Ring Sizes value list (Shanks › Ring Sizes) — pick the system your customers use, USA or Europe or British — and wire it into Classic’s Ring Diameter. The list outputs a diameter in millimetres, which is what every shank component expects. Change the dropdown and the ring resizes.

  2. Shape the band. Add Classic - Profile (Shanks › Classic) and wire its output into Classic’s Top Profile. This is a parameter component: it bundles a set of related settings into one value. Only the inputs you actually connect are applied — anything you leave alone keeps the builder’s own default.

  3. Add stones. Add Classic - Gems Parameters and wire it into Classic’s Gems input, then set carat and shape on it. Classic’s Gems and Meshes outputs carry the stones as separate geometry from the metal, so you can render or export them apart.

Getting something out

The BReps output is Rhino geometry — bake it, or keep working with it in Grasshopper. When you want a deliverable instead, the Artisan › Exporters group takes it from there: Exporter 3DM Files, Exporter Manufacturing STL for casting, Exporter GLB Files for the web, or the base64 variants when the result is going straight into an application rather than onto disk.

Two other outputs are worth knowing about early. Taxonomy is the ring’s full parameter set as a dictionary — feed it to the matching component in the Readers tab to read any single value back out. Semantic is a plain-language sentence describing what was built, which is what a configurator or a product listing shows to a customer.

Next

How a definition is built explains the four families of component and the pattern they share — the fastest way to make sense of the full reference.