Galapagos in Grasshopper: Evolutionary Solver Tutorial
Galapagos is Grasshopper’s built-in optimisation solver: you connect the Number Sliders it may change (the genes) and one number to maximise or minimise (the fitness),
April 12, 2024
Founder, Architect & Authorized Rhino Trainer®
Thomas Jeremy Tait is the Founder and Lead Instructor at Hopific, where he provides strategic leadership for the platform’s computational design curriculum. With over a decade of hands-on experience as a Lead Design Architect and Project Manager at internationally recognized architecture practices such as Snøhetta and NADAAA, Thomas brings a strong technical background, production-driven habits, and forward-thinking creativity to all the tutorials and programs he oversees.
Thomas began his computational design career solving practical design challenges on high-profile projects, moving quickly into training his peers at Snøhetta. Over his career, he has contributed to award-winning buildings like the Beijing Public Library and the Budapest South Gate Masterplan, logging over 5,000 professional hours in Grasshopper and successfully training more than 300 architects. As a McNeel-endorsed Authorized Rhino Trainer® (ART), Thomas specializes in teaching a streamlined, design-first approach. He loves diving into complex data trees, optimizing algorithmic workflows, and solving technical design mysteries so architects can focus on creativity instead of wrestling with the software.
Galapagos is Grasshopper’s built-in optimisation solver: you connect the Number Sliders it may change (the genes) and one number to maximise or minimise (the fitness),
Lists are at the heart of almost everything we do in Grasshopper, but understanding the order of elements within those lists, especially when selecting a
Grasshopper provides several ways of displaying text in the Rhino viewport, but the main two components are the Text Tag and Text Tag 3D components.
When a component fails to run and the input is a panel containing numbers, the reason is that the panel turns numbers into text. To
To sum a list of numbers in Grasshopper, use the Mass Addition component: it returns the total in its Result (R) output, and every running
The Image Sampler reads the colour or brightness of an image at given coordinates and turns it into numbers you can use to drive geometry.
To remove duplicate curves, first get a representative point for each curve and then use the ‘Cull Duplicates‘ (CullPt) component. The component returns the indices
Grasshopper is a precise tool, sometimes too precise for its own good. In practice, we don’t usually need numbers that looks like this: 3.41641526. A
If you have a component on your Grasshopper canvas and you are not sure where to find it in the component tabs, simply use the