Food4Rhino

Grasshopper geometry has come a long way -- and with Rhino 6 now offering geometry in rendered viewports, you can produce incredible visuals without ever baking to Rhino.  One thing that has been traditionally missing, however, is some basic forms of interactivity with Grasshopper geometry.  It has been impossible or cumbersome to select live Grasshopper geometry in the past.  But not anymore!

NBBJ digital presents: Mouse Rat

Credits
// Written by Dan Cascaval + Marc Syp during Dan's internship at NBBJ in 2018. 
// Dan provided the special magic of live listeners for the keyboard modifier keys. 
// Special thanks to Andrew Heumann for the original mouse click code that served as the jumping off point for this enhanced mouse click plugin.

Description
Mouse Rat is a Grasshopper plugin that allows you to select Grasshopper preview meshes directly in the Rhino viewport, which you can then use in Grasshopper to trigger additional calculations or display information. Selected data can also be piped to a Human UI (sold separately) window to show detailed data about a selected object.  

What makes Mouse Rat special is is the use of live listeners for modifier keys (Ctrl, Alt, Shift). Traditional solutions have used a mouse capture mode that must be toggled on and off using grasshopper methods (a Boolean Toggle, for instance), which causes all mouse clicks to be intercepted in the Rhino app.  This is cumbersome from a UX standpoint, because it means you have to be very careful about turning the mode on and off.

Mouse Rat lets you select the modifier keys you would like to use to activate the click selection mode, and even includes a multi-select component that lets you add and remove from your selection using the Shift and Ctrl keys along with Alt.