Textures in Grasshopper

Create and edit procedural or bitmap textures within Grasshopper.

Full Control of Your Textures

Grasshopper contains robust texture components. This makes it possible to create and edit 2D procedural or bitmap textures directly in Grasshopper. Existing textures can be queried from open Rhino files and new ones baked out for use in the model.

Try It

  1. Download Rhino 9 WIP for Windows or Mac.
  2. Download and open the Try_GH_Textures.gh file. This document contains several of the new texture components found in Rhino 9. Using this file, you can make and edit multiple procedural fBm textures easily.
  3. To open this file, start Rhino 9 followed by Grasshopper using the Grasshopper command. In the Grasshopper File menu, open the file downloaded in step 1.
  4. In Rhino, open the Textures panel using the Textures command. This panel will show 2D textures used in and saved to the open 3dm file.
  5. Return to the Grasshopper canvas and click the Bake Content button on the Content Cache component. This will create a texture in the Rhino document named “My fBm texture 1” which can be seen in the Textures panel.
  6. Use the control knob component at the beginning of the Grasshopper file to change the numeric value to 2.
  7. Drag the handle on the number slider connected to the Roughness value of the fBm Texture component to 0.5.
  8. Drag the handle on the number slider connected to the Octaves value of the fBm Texture component to 7.
  9. Edit the number connected to the Gain value of the fBm Texture component to 4 by double-clicking the numeric value on the slider.
  10. Click the Bake Content button on the Content Cache component. This will create another texture in the Rhino document named My fBm texture 2 which can be seen in the Textures panel.
  11. Experiment with other settings combinations including color swatch changes. If the control knob uses a value previously baked, the new texture will overwrite the previously baked one of the same name. Use new control knob values before baking for unique texture names.
  12. Please ask questions and give feedback on the Discourse Forum.

Rhino Commands