About Groundhog

Introduction

As with most Grasshopper plugins, Groundhog provides new components that offer users additional functionality or more convenient workflows. These components are, for now, relatively simple methods for analysing or representing landscape features that are useful across a number of common scenarios.

Unlike most other plugins, Groundhog also attempts to provide comprehensive background information about how to use its own components, and how to use computational design methods in landscape architecture more broadly. To this end, it contains a range of documentation (by way of this website) in the form of articles and reference models/definitions.

Most of the functionality and documentation provided here is not at the bleeding-edge of computational design practice. However, while there are plenty of researchers, practices, and schools that are pushing the limits of design technology in our discipline there are few open, detailed, and accessible guides for understanding how they are doing so. Moreover, almost all online resources for learning Grasshopper assume architectural intent and impart skills or techniques that are poorly-suited to the design of landscapes. Groundhog aims to address this gap and provide capabilities alongside an understanding of what computation is, how it works, and where it can be useful in landscape architecture.

Developer

Philip Belesky is an Lecturer in the Landscape Architecture discipline at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. He has previously worked as a programmer and computational designer. His current research explores the use of computational methods and tooling to design landscape systems — more information available at philipbelesky.com.

Support requests, bug reports, feature suggestions and other plugin-related communications can be made as outlined on the plugin page. For other matters please email me using at [email protected].

Contributors

Albert Rex produced various project models and their documentation pages, alongside a range of improvements in other pages and component icons.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the SRIC of the RMIT School of Architecture and Urban Design for their support. Thanks also to the RMIT Landscape Architecture students from Communications 2 in 2018, and those from the Skin & Scale and Interference Pattern studio options.

Contributing

See the CONTRIBUTING.md file on Github for information on how to help contribute to the project. Pull requests are welcome for both the plugin code and to the example files and documentation that define this website.

License and Use

The source code for this website, its content, the plugin, and associated models/definitions are licensed under the terms of the GPL v3 License.

If you’re using Groundhog for commercial projects or academic research I’d love to hear about it.