HoopSnake, apart from a legendary creature, is a component for the Grasshopper 3D platform. What it does in principle is to create a copy of the data it receives at it's input upon user request and store it locally. This duplicate is made available through a standard Grasshopper parameter output.

What this means in practice is that it is possible through the use of HoopSnake to send the output of a set of components back to it's input in a looping fashion. With the help of a little bit of Data Tree / Data List manipulation, this should open up some new possibilities for iterative process modeling.

The loop can be stopped at any point either by the user or automatically by setting a termination condition (the third input of the component) to false. This way, an operation mode quite similar to a "while" loop can be modeled in Grasshopper, without any coding. This is beneficial primarily to the clarity of a definition, since it enables the exposure of an iterative solution's logic outside a scripting component.

With the download file examples of various Hoopsnake configurations are included.

The latest version of Hoopsnake has been found to work with Grasshopper v0.8.0066.

Hoopsnake couldn't have been made possible without the fruitful discussions with Pirouz Nourian and Michael Bittermann, at the Chair of Design Informatics at TU Delft.

Hoopsnake is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

HoopSnake is and will remain free for educational and personal use. However, it's development requires a significant amount of time and effort. If you find it useful in any way, please consider supporting by donating.