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Rook Rook Rook

What is Rook

Rook gives your AI assistant nearly 400 specialized tools for operating Rhino 3D and Grasshopper — and they go deep. Geometry creation and analysis, complex scripted operations, full Grasshopper definitions, layers, blocks, materials, and whole-document workflows: if Rhino and Grasshopper can do it, there’s very likely a Rook tool for it.

But capable doesn’t mean autopilot. A designer rarely wants to hand the whole design to a machine — so Rook isn’t built to design for you. It’s built to help you design, at whatever stage you’re in, and it’s flexible enough that you decide what that help looks like.

A few of the ways designers put it to work:

  • Heavy geometry & analysis — run a curvature or draft-angle study across a set of surfaces, or a complex scripted operation you’d otherwise hand-write in RhinoScript.
  • Scripting inside Grasshopper — generate a Python or C# script component that does exactly what your definition needs.
  • Layers & blocks — sort objects onto sensible layers, find and purge duplicate blocks, rename and restructure.
  • Document-level work — units and settings, references, import/export, and batch operations across the whole file.
  • Getting set up — grids, reference geometry, arrays: scaffolding you take over and build on.

Some designers lean on Rook for one of these; others for all of them. It meets you where you are in the process.

The shift

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The old way to use Rhino is to learn it — hundreds of commands and options, built up over years. With Rook, you talk to an assistant you already use (Claude Desktop, Codex, or one inside your code editor) and it drives Rhino for you. You stay the designer and stay in the conversation; Rook handles the mechanics.

You: “Run a curvature analysis on these surfaces and flag anything too sharp, then sort the results onto their own layer.”

Rook: Runs the analysis, tags the problem areas, and organizes them — ready for you to act on.

A few workflows

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The same conversation can reach across Rook’s modules. A few examples:

BIM coordination — with RookBIM

You: “List every door on Level 2 with its fire rating, and select the ones that are missing one.”

Rook: Queries the model’s BIM elements, pulls each door’s parameters, reports the list, and selects the doors with no rating set — ready for you to fix.

Visualization — with RookVision

You: “Capture the north elevation and render it as a dawn watercolour with faint mist — give me a few options and bring the one I pick back in.”

Rook: Captures the viewport, enriches the prompt with the scene context, generates several variants, and drops the one you approve back into the document as a PictureFrame.

Flythrough — with the Director (RookVisionDirector)

You: “Fly the camera along this curve, hold focus on the tower, and package an MP4.”

Rook: Resolves an explicit camera at every frame, renders the sequence as clean per-frame transactions, and assembles it into an H.264 MP4.

Why it works

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Behind the scenes, Rook draws on a library of real Rhino and Grasshopper knowledge — how components fit together, which commands do what, and the patterns experienced users rely on. You get the benefit of that expertise without having to learn it.

What you need

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  • Rhino 8 on Windows
  • An AI assistant that supports MCP — Claude Desktop, Codex, or an MCP-capable assistant in your IDE
  • An account/key for whichever AI model you prefer — Claude, GPT, or a local model

Ready? → Install Rook