Thank you, TIG. There was a small problematic part I could not handle, so I copied it from your cleaned-up version. And you're right... sometimes I spend too much time looking for a script to automate a task or a 3d warehouse model that suits my needs, when I could have done it manually in half the time. But I highly recommend "extend close lines". It really saved me time with this drawing. And Todd, thank you for checking out this odd case. I'll continue in the Smustard forum.

It already exists... http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?p=40025#p40025 Put the fast_tw.rb file in the Plugins folder: 'fast'=it's the quickest way & 'tw' = TextureWriter To use it you just type fast_tw <enter> in the Ruby Console. Any material textures in the model (whether used or not) are then extracted into the model's folder as jpgs etc...

context sensitive

Thanks Adam - I am actually trying your program as you speak as an example of what the display could look like and it looks great but I am not looking for a lighting tool. My equivalent "lighting effect" is created by custom radiation functions that depend on the type of source, the distance from the source, and blockage and are not light sources. I am not lookig for photo realism but for a representation of intensity on surfaces. The essence of my question is: what technique could be used to color small portions of the Sketchup drawing? The resolution I am looking for is typically 30 cm square for drawings that are the size of a building. Is there some way to divide up each face of every entity and assign a color to it based on the result of my "radiation function" as the point. Perhaps this is part of the infrastructure you mention? Thanks for your help.

Organizer is just trying to load the .rb files it finds in the subfolders of your Plugins menu. The usual fix is to explicitly exclude subfolders that are created by other plugins. You can do this by adding the subfolder's name to the "SmustardOrganizerExcludeFolders.txt" file. If that doesn't fix it, contact me at Smustard and we'll troubleshoot it.

Yes, it has been that way since the first release of Ruby back in June 2004. We ask every release for that to be fixed. The good news is that with V7, we did get a larger COURIER font for the Ruby Console instead of a smaller ARIAL font or whatever it was. Perhaps I can do some more smooth talking with the Google developers and get them to fix this too. It is quite annoying, and really does slow performance on long running traces. Todd

@thomthom said: I'd be very happy if SU8 focused on stability, bugfixes, GUI and UI improvements pluss more ruby power. I totally agree with you thomthom. Fix the core problems - we can always count on this community to develop cool new features! BTW - I used one 20-inch monitor with SU for a long time and have recently gone to two 22-inch widescreen LCDs at home and must say it is wayyyy more enjoyable now since I can really spread out and put all of my palettes on one monitor and model in the other. Never going back!

In your example e = edge... there are several ways of doing everything in Ruby... edges.each{|e|e.erase! if e.valid?} # is the same as... edges.each{|edge|edge.erase! if edge.valid?} # is the same as... edges.each{|edge| if edge.valid? edge.erase! end#if } So 'each' of the 'edges' - called 'edge' (or whatever) is processed in turn inside the {}: 'edge' as a variable doesn't survive outside of the {} unless you declare it outside of them later... It's become something of a standard to use |e| as 'entity'... However, whatever text is inside the the || it is used as the variable you are interested in. It CAN be anything 'legal'... Sketchup.active_model.entities.each{|e|puts e.typename; puts "the next entity..."} here 'e' is the same as 'entity' Sketchup.active_model.entities.each{|entity|puts entity.typename; puts "the next entity..."} I comes down to choice and clarity - if you use it briefly the 'e' might be fine, if 'e' is drifting about many lines of code later, then you might have prefer it to have been called 'edge' or something clearer... mats=[];Sketchup.active_model.materials.each{|material|mats.push(material.name)} mats.each{|e|puts e} ...

Ah... ...was kind of hoping you'd say no here, and we could expect an speed update... oh well. Just had a brainwave while doing some sandboxing.

You get .php some times because the link goes to a PHP script which redirects you to the download. When that happens you have to link the link instead of Save As.

@thomthom said: @tig said: EntitiesObserver onElementAdded ? Then I'd have to monitor every group and component definition and the model object. I'm not that familiar with the overhead of Observers. But this sounds like it'd be quite a lot of observers running... Anyone knows what the performance impact of doing this would be? I think it's a worthwhile experiment to create a meta-observer (built on the existing observers) that watches a "class" of entities - such as a GroupsObserver, or something like that.

NULL characters aren't allowed in HTML. And NULL characters are in C (I think) used to terminate a string.

I think you are stuck with having to loop through the points to find the triangles you want to make faces from. You might be interested in the PolygonMesh class. It looks like it might be able to handle the mesh creation faster than just adding the faces directly. http://code.google.com/apis/sketchup/docs/ourdoc/polygonmesh.html @unknownuser said: The PolygonMesh class contains methods to create polygon mesh structures. This is useful if you need to write a custom importer/exporter in Ruby that works at the level of triangulated polygons. For example, you can determine the triangles that make up a 15-sided SketchUp face by using this class, or write a SketchupImporter that reads a data file, creates a mesh from it, and draws faces based on the mesh. IT also mentions in al old version of the API that you can pre-specify the amount of points and faces that are going to be added to the mesh to speed up the creation process. Glad you can work out the delauney bit, I'm sure you'll get the SketchUp API under control in no time, Chris

I'll look into it. I've had scattered reports of problems, even though it tested fine for me.

Open the Outliner and Entity-Info windows and dock them together. Select the Component Instance in question in the Outliner and its Definition-Name AND Instance-Name appear in the Entity-Info window. Edit these as desired. Changing the Definition-Name will globally rename the Definition. Each Instance can have its own name too... However, if you want to replace parts of names within a set of several definitions' names [like "AB" with "XY"], then to do this globally you need something this: ### this does all definitions' AND instances' names; edit 'text_go=/text_in=' to suit... text_go="AB";text_in="XY";Sketchup.active_model.definitions.each{|defn|defn.name=defn.name.gsub(text_go,text_in);defn.instances.each{|inst|inst.name=inst.name.gsub(text_go,text_in)}} ### remove the defn.name... part to leave them alone OR remove the defn.instances... part to leave them alone... I'll leave you to make the app/menu etc...

@thomthom said: Contact the maker of the plugin and explain what's happening. Yes, I'd seen mention of the problem elsewhere. I thought first just to modify Didier's ruby, but it is incrypted: so I sent a PM to him. Have not heard back.

@TIG: Mirror3_1 doesn't appear to accept input from the VCB. That's what is causing the problem. Just doing it by mouse click is easy because all the clicks generate IP's. But having to generate pt2 programatically allows only the creation of a Point3d, because InputPoint has no method for setting it's 3D coordinate.

And of course, there is TIG's meticulous MatrixProximity (http://www.pushpullbar.com/forums/ruby-scripts/9467-visual-index-ruby-scripts.html#post131588) along with Chris's wonderful ruby.

Thanks all for yur help. I have encountered very weird things with this 'bug', like: create a new empty group, put a face in it, pushpull the face, and list all the entities of the group. I got several faces and a component instance . @unknownuser said: I think the secret is to make the empty new group AND put something into its entities asap. Yes, I've tried that too, it works most of the time but not 100% Pfff, I'll let you know if I find a way to eradicate this bug. Thank you,

Thanks, Whaat. That did the trick. So the reason behind this is that SU was only invalidating a default area of the screen around the first point because I didn't implement getExtents?