TIG, I've made a discovery. Evidently I have a different version of Grow on my machine at work thatn at home. The one at home gives me an arrow to set the center of the grow operation and three different dialog boxes with the second covering scaling including the option to have exponential or linear scaling. The version at work, which I downloaded from Didier's library today doesn't give me those options or the arrow. Hmmm...... Maybe I have an old version at work? But. I have a puzzle about the version I have at home. I'm trying to create a series of circles that get smaller as they go up. In the version at work, I entered a scale of 0.9 (for both X and Y scaling) and the circles got smaller as they went up. The version I have on my home machine makes progressively larger circles with that same 0.9 for X and Y. I tried a -0.9 but that doesn't help either.

Hi TIG, we have a new code for energy calculation of non-residential buildings in germany (DIN 18599), which is a national implementation of the EU regulation on "energy efficency in buildings". In small houses you only had to get the four facades, a few windows, a roof and a floor to describe the building. The new code lists 33 different profiles (single office, group office, classroom, retail, auditorium, hotel room, restaurant, kitchen, archive, workshop,...) with many underlying parameters such as duration of daily use, duration of heating, cooling and air conditioning, temperature, strength of lighting, internal energy sources (persons, PCs, lighting,...). The problem now is that one building might have between 4 and 10 different zones/usage profiles, so one facade must get splitted and the surface area including windows has to be calculated for each zone. I have done this manually from plans and have written a very complex Excel-sheet to evaluate the zones and get the effective area of walls, ceilings, windows, etc. for each zone. Every surface must be sorted by orientation and type of construction. This data has to be transferred to my energy simulation software. What I need is a 3D-Editor to build a simplified 3d model (--> Sketchup) and a possibility to group spaces as rooms, assign information to them (profile/zone, ground area, temp, ...) and extract the information into a database. This database must provide 3 to 4 lists (list of zones, list of rooms, list of elements, maybe list of element layers, each including special infos) that can be exported to external software. To make it a little bit more complicated: Usually you only have exterior elements which can cause energy losses. But if you have interior elements with different temperatures on each side, you have to consider those, too. So I need a script, that can not only calculate the area, but also differentiate between areas to outside air, to outside soil, to inside rooms with lower temp, ... On my wish list would be also a routine that marks geometry problems and a interface to export directly via txt-file into my energy simulation prog. Okay, that's it in short. Do you think, this is possible? I don't know anything about Ruby Scripts, but I guess that kind of database would be a bit too complicated... Looking forward to your answer! Leo

JC> Go to this link and pickup this FREE program..It has a Fantastic "bend" function.. http://www.cbmodelpro.com/forum.html ...(You may have to type it in as I can't seem to get links to work..) Richard

There was an area script written some time ago, but I can't remember the name or the author (TBD maybe?). It updated when you made changes, but was far from perfect. I cannot find in on my system anymore. It was not fully developed but showed great promise. Maybe someone else can remember it.

Klaudius's k-tools.rb has long offered an 'L' command that's effectively a 'fillet'. You enter a radius and pick the edges (o radius extends/trims them at the same angle without a radius. However since this tool erases edges and replaces them with new shorter edges plus an arc you loose any faces... so I'd suggest that if the edges have a shared face then you draw the new arc and erase the then spare bits of edge that get left over - away from the arc circumference - so that the pre-existing face remains with its new perimeter... No need to reinvent the wheel just rework Klaudius's ideas ?

Yes, the size problem is strange. I know that when you put more spaces in the prompt value it works prompts=["help file............"] but why this ? No logical explanation...

We will look at this again, but I believe the group/component/entity will report its own material and not the "Color by Layer" material. But we will try it. It would be a shame to miss the obvious answer. TextureHelper lets us save copies of the texture file for the layer, but neither Texture Helper of UVQHelper seem to let us access the texture size. @unknownuser said: What's wrong with this agonizing approach: create an "array entry" for every layer For every group/component/entity... determine if it has any material associated with it if so, for it's layer "array entry", add the material to it as a subarray When done, you have an array of layers, and each layer records the materials in it. From the first post, I thought I was missing the obvious. This is the obvious approach. Since materials don't have layers, but objects have both materials and layers, you just have to run the objects and make your own list. From my perspective, no big deal - it's just not a quick call to any singe method to get it done. Todd

Reading Excel files could be done by using roo. azuby

Danke schoen, Burkhard. Hast du gehaben eine gut Reise für Arbeit? Leider wir nicht sprechen für ein lange Zeit, und mein Deutsch heute ist nicht gut.

For quick and easy testing, you can dump all the needed libraries into /Plugins. Make a backup of /Plugins first, so putting it back to original status is a no brainer.

Didier, I downloaded from the link above. The attachment shows the active selection (the top-most surface) and the hidden lines I wanted to select so I could delete them. It seems the menu is missing an option for Hidden lines or am I overlooking something? Also, should the Search Through list include "current selection" option? John [image: Hidden Edges.png]

Aah, thx for that, got the DL. Previously I went to your home page, selected "Newest Plugins" and selected the "Cutting Windows" (which still gives me that error referred to above).

Thx for the heads-up!

Wow, I must have been sleeping on the job on that one. model.*active_*entities I'll update the Smustard version. Thanks,

I don't think we disagree about anything. I may have misread one of your posts, thinking you were saying to put downloaded .rb files into the Tools folder, and that's what prompted my first post here. If you didn't mean to say that, then my comment was irrelevant. Regards,

@robmoors said: If anyone is interested in advancing this ruby, a window in which you can tick the exports and specify their file names and their location would be awesome. Any progress on this one? I used it the other day and all the files showed up with no name, just a .dwg .obj etc... I would welcome a more refined script. Thanks.

I presume you are a Vectorworks user which has a tool function that does this. You might look at the Skin.rb which can do some of the same thing. http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?f=153&t=1534&p=23813&hilit=skin#p23813

Yes, I put: http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/download/file.php?id=2482 in the post.

Hi Gaieus Thanks for your quick reply. I will take a look at Didirs script. Thanks Jorgensen