Tapeworm for Grasshopper
Making a lot of animations for work through Grasshopper, I’ve decided to improve the workflow of compiling the frames into video or gifs.
No need to use web based gif/video compilers or expensive third party applications anymore, all that can be done directly from Grasshopper !
The first concepts of the plugin brings us back to April 2020 when I first heard of FFmpeg. FFmpeg is a command line based software that “is the leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that humans and machines have created.” (source : ffmpeg.org)
The idea was that Grasshopper would serve as the user interface to run FFmpeg command lines directly into Windows shell (at first).
During the same month, I already had a first personal working version of what would later become Tapeworm.
As this project was my first real case use of Python, I started to have a tons of questions to make sure that the user experience would be the easiest and seamless from installation to usability. The coding point of view was also a big subject. The project should be easy to expand, add new user requested features and be easy to debug.
This is where I met Marc Differding from the Grasshopper forum, who suggested to develop the plugin in collaboration.
Marc has been of a huge help when it came to image sequence detection, mac0S support and improvements of the general structure of the python files… But also in many different other topics.
The development took a bit longer than expected, as we tried different ways to integrate the ffmpeg settings in a Grasshopper way, as Windows and MacOS differs on many levels and as it was basically a side project for both of us. :-)
March 9th 2021, we released the first version of Tapeworm. The plugin currently allows for various format conversions, compiling and extracting frames from gif and videos, and a few others. The setting library is more likely to expand as possible user requests fill in.
The Grasshopper plugin is available for free on Food4Rhino, and the release’s source code is available on our Github.
Here under is the installation guide for ffmpeg (free) and Tapeworm (also free).
To watch Tapeworm in action, skip to 9:30, as we demonstrate a frames to gif conversion.
We hope you’ll like it !
Don’t hesitate to contact us for feature requests or questions !
Antoine and Marc -