A conversation with Andy Payne
I met Andy Payne in the summer of 2016. Autodesk had acquired Monolith1 (a voxel-based editor) from Andy and Pan earlier that year, and I joined them as an intern to build a generator of 3D-printed material gradients and play with a Zmorph 3D printer.
I interned at Autodesk’s Boston Seaport office with Jose Luis García del Castillo and Keith Alfaro. Jose Luis and I would bike to Central Square, ride the Red Line T to South Station, and hop onto the Silver Line Bus to Drydock Avenue. By the end of the summer, I open-sourced Voxel2GCode2—a set of workflows to transform geometric objects and voxel-based models into 3D-printable G-code instructions.
Andy is an architect and software developer at McNeel, the company behind Rhino and Grasshopper 3D. We recorded a podcast conversation in New Orleans in September 2022, where I learned about Andy's new adventure.
Enjoy this episode on the origins of Grasshopper, Grasshopper 2, Rhino.Compute, teaching, learning to code, generative AI, open-source code and monetization, and Andy's journey.
We'll premiere the episode on YouTube on Wednesday, March 27, at 2 PM ET, which means you'll be able to chat with Andy and me during the episode.
You can RSVP here.
Monolith is a voxel-based editor that sits somewhere in between 3D CAD apps like AutoCAD and Rhino and pixel-based image-editing apps such as Photoshop. One of Monolith’s strengths is its capability to produce multi-material 3D prints with varying material densities. ↩
You can find Voxel2GCode on GitHub. ↩
