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

I'd love to hear from you.

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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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