👋 Hi there, welcome to Discover! 💡

Discover is an optimization tool built to work with Rhino Grasshopper. It is being developed by Colidescope as free software with the goal of promoting performance-driven automated design workflows in the architecture, engineering, and construction industries.

Requirements

• PC running Windows 10 64-bit
• Rhino 6 - Discover can probably be made to work with Rhino 5 as well as the OSX version but it is not supported at this time.
• Python 3.7
• Web browser (such as Chrome or Firefox)

Installation

Installing Python

Currently Windows does not ship with Python, so if you’ve never used Python or you’re not sure, you will need to install a version of Python on your computer.

Discover is built on Python 3.7.4, which is the latest version at the time of writing, but any version of Python 3 should work. If you’d like to use Python 2 it can probably be made to work but it is not supported at this time. If you already have Python 3 installed you can skip to the next step.

1. Go to the Python download page and select the latest Python 3 release (3.7.4 at time of writing).
2. On the download page, scroll down and under ‘Files’ select and download the Windows x86-64 executable installer.
3. Run the .exe installation file to install Python on your computer. IMPORTANT: make sure you select the option to “Add Python 3.7 to PATH”. Discover will not work if this is not checked.

Downloading Discover

1. Click on the download link on the left to download a zip file with the latest release of Discover
2. Unzip the file to a new folder on your computer.

Installing dependencies

1. Double-click the discover.bat script in the folder where you unzipped Discover. The first time you run the script it will install any dependencies which are needed for Python. This only needs to happen once. After checking the dependencies the script will start the Discover server and launch the app in your default web browser.
2. Windows may ask for admin privileges the first time you run the server. Make sure to click ‘Allow access’. You should only have to do this once.

Installing the Grasshopper components

Discover includes a Grasshopper library of custom components which allows the optimization server to communicate with your Grasshopper model. To install the components:

1. Open Grasshopper and go to File -> Special Folders -> Components Folder. This will open the folder where Grasshopper stores its custom plugin files.
2. Copy all the files in the /Grasshopper Plugin folder of the Discover zip file to Grasshopper’s Components Folder.
3. Restart Grasshopper. You should now see a new tab in the ribbon called ‘Discover’ with the 7 Discover components loaded.

Working with Discover

Starting the server

Double-click the discover.bat script in the folder where you unzipped Discover. This will open a Command Prompt window, start the Discover server, and launch the app in your default web browser. Make sure to keep the Command Prompt window open while you’re using Discover.

Shutting down the server

When you’re done using Discover, close the Command Prompt window to shut down the server.

Known issues

• During the optimization process, Discover writes certain files to a local directory for each computed design. The location of this directory is based on the location of the .gh file. There is a known issue where if your .gh file is in a folder which is hosted on a network or a cloud sharing service like Dropbox, the writing process can take too long, causing the components and server to get out of sync. This can result in the optimization process stopping or many of the same designs being generated at once. If you experience these issues make sure your .gh file is located in a local folder on your computer and is not being shared over any network.

Support

This program is distributed for free in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty or guarantee that it will work the way it’s described or work at all. That being said, if you’d like to get in touch please email us at support(at)colidescope.com or submit a bug using the link below:

Report Bug