Andy Payne—architect and software developer at McNeel—on the origins of Grasshopper, Grasshopper 2, Rhino.Compute, teaching, learning to code, generative AI, open-source code, and his journey.


Andy Payne is a licensed architect and software developer at Robert McNeel & Associates, the company behind Rhino and Grasshopper 3D. He is a Doctor of Design graduate from Harvard's Graduate School of Design (2014). Andy has lectured and taught workshops throughout the US, Canada, and Europe, and his work has received awards from several leading academic organizations. Andy has also co-authored several software plugins and desktop apps (including Firefly and Monolith). At McNeel, Andy works on the Grasshopper and Rhino.Compute projects for the Rhino 3D modeling environment.


Connect with Andy



LinkedIn


LIFT Architects


Monolith by Andy Payne & Panagiotis Michalatos

Firefly by Andy Payne & Jason Kelly Johnson

Favorite quotes


“Nobody wants to spend days and days developing a model. Our job as developers is to make it as easy as possible. […] There’s something about the craft and time you spent developing your ideas into a 3D model. There’s something about that investment that makes it worthwhile. When you have an easy AI button that makes it for you then it trivializes [the process].” —Andy Payne
“Originally the product was called Explicit History, because it was a different approach to Rhino's native (implicit) history feature.” —David Rutten

Links



Rhinoceros


Grasshopper 3D


Explicit History


Form-Z


3ds Max


Slow Food Nation Canopy (2008)

Grasshopper Primer by Andy Payne & Rajaa Issa

Grasshopper Data Trees


Rhino.Compute (Source code)

Grasshopper Hops


New Grasshopper data types


Rhino Core-Hour Billing


Visual Programming

C-Sharp (C#), Visual Basic (VB) & Python
Stable Diffusion, DALL-E & Midjourney

Nighthawks by Edward Hopper

IKEA effect


People mentioned



Rajaa Issa · McNeel

David Rutten · McNeel

Jason Kelly Johnson · FUTUREFORMS


Daniel Piker


Shelby Doyle

Edward Hopper

Panagiotis Michalatos


Chapters


00:00 · Introduction
00:35 · Andy Payne
04:11 · Grasshopper origins
07:23 · Andy meets Grasshopper
09:19 · Grasshopper Primer
10:26 · Grasshopper 1.0
13:22 · Grasshopper 2
15:11 · Developing Grasshopper
16:59 · New data types
18:57 · Rhino Compute & Hops
22:32 · Cloud billing
27:05 · Teaching
30:07 · Visual programming
36:23 · Open source & monetization
42:03 · McNeel Forum
50:07 · Connect with Andy
51:57 · Learning to code
58:00 · Generative AI
01:02:09 · The IKEA effect
01:05:38 · Authorship
01:08:56 · AI trade-offs
01:12:58 · Panagiotis Michalatos
01:16:02 · Advice for young people
01:17:08 · Success
01:18:35 · $100 or less
01:20:12 · Outro


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Show notes, transcripts, and past episodes at gettingsimple.com/podcast.

Thanks to Andrea Villalón Paredes for editing this interview.
Sleep and A Loop to Kill For songs by Steve Combs under CC BY 4.0.


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