And I see you just joined SCF, so I'll assume your new to Ruby... see: Ruby Newbie's Guide to Getting Started Get the CHM Ruby Reference, as instructed in the Guide... Get the full Ruby installer: Ruby (v1.8.6-p287) Windows One-Click Installer Get the !loadpaths.rb script (so you can access standard Ruby lib files): [Code] Ruby LOAD PATHs script (Win32) (Dan Rathbun / Jim Foltz)

Yes, I understand. I've seen your praising for it. That made me want to try to learn it in addition to standard JS. Can say.. Haven't been using Jquery for long(or JS for that matter), but only the selectors themself is worth the use of it.

@adamb said: Ruby has "green threads" which is simply the Ruby interpreter locally slicing & dicing its own execution thread. But since the Ruby intepreter itself is being scheduled from the runloop of SketchUp, its of little use for asyncronous work. In other words, if I have a progress bar inside a C extension, it will suffer same 'halt' as whole SU user interface, when Ruby is doing heavy lifting, right? Does it mean that I have to start an independent thread with the progress bar to have it updated in same conditions?

Creating entities in SketchUp is slow! Very slow and it gets slower the more entities you have in the context. It also triggers all kinds of observers etc. If possible, avoid any kind of calculations without temp geometry. ( Some times you have to, like when you want to trigger SU's merge feature to make sure things heal up properly. Or if you need to get the current user axis - then you need to create two dummy groups.) And yes, using the built in methods of SU for calculations is much faster than trying to do it in Ruby. Make use of the Geom module for all it's worth. For Vertex Tools I even ported the method that calculated soft selection to a C extension because in Ruby it was slow as a sleeping snail. Any calculation, even simple 2 + 2 operations eat time in Ruby - which you notice quickly when you do it in a look. But the biggest bottleneck is adding entities in SU, and that's not much you can work around other than trying to use the bulk methods whenever possible.

there is one that is a SU plugin http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=25800#p222075

That sounds good. Though, might be good to start simple, just so that it doesn't get so complex it'll never finish. (I've been there soooo many times... )

Great! Thank you Dan.

A lightweight solution for plugin installers is to use self-extracting zips: http://www.izarc.org/tutorials.html#sfx izarc gives you a few basic options as well. You'll have to make separate installers for 32/64bit Windows (since 64-bit systems use C:\Program Files (x86)).

Asking is probably wise. I'll see what I'll do later on. It's also not that hard creating new icons Thanks for the advice, both of you!

(2 * 3).m

1001 Thanks Chris ! it's exactly what I was looking for. You can't imagine how many time I search.

@unknownuser said: Thanks for the sample code and the explanation. I wasn't aware that a Raytracer can be written in such a small piece of code!! Quite tiny indeed... there are others too, like http://tog.acm.org/resources/GraphicsGems/gemsiv/minray/

Is there a Windows build in sight?

@adamb said: Also tried Chris Fullmer's shape blender but it ignores UVs Yeah, sorry Adam. I don't actually do a lot of rendering or texturing, so I'm not really a UV person yet. In theory I'll be re-writing shapebender someday to account for UV's. I'm sure you guys are excited thinking about that headache - everyday 20 new noob questions from me about textures

which is not support that much anymore. and needs MS COM mumbo jumbo to work

I've experimented with using start_timer, and changing the time and/or partition size on the fly. It just gets far too slow to be worthwhile. http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=27092&p=234026#p234026 Using an Animation class instead of a timer may be easier to code, but I'd guess the result would be similar.

Thanks a lot for your answer, Mayby i'm wrong, but i believe, you misunderstand me. so i show you what i've programmed: ` driller= Sketchup.active_model.definitions.load("\driller.skp") pos_driller = Geom::Point3d.new 47,32,25 set_driller= Geom::Transformation.new pos_driller instance1 = entities.add_instance driller, set_driller cuboid_wood = Sketchup.active_model.definitions.load("\Cuboid_wood.skp") pos_cuboid = Geom::Point3d.new 0,0,0 set_cuboid = Geom::Transformation.new pos_cuboid instance2 = entities.add_instance cuboid_wood, set_cuboid` but this is hardcoded and i want that the computer places the objects correctly together automatically,by calculating the best position, but i can't calculate the size of these objects, because i don't know how. (i would have to measure the size with the measure-tool in SU with the mouse, but it should retrieve the values with a method) I have the task to do that with many components, that's why i wouldn't say the detailed coordinates for every components, which i load. the programm should be able to load componentes, put it together correctly and dynamically, take some photos in different perspectives, save these pictures, clear it all and start at the beginning with other components ... everthing is quite clear to me, with the exception of the hardcoded coordinates of these objects P.S. i have wrote this problem in a new topic too

Thanks ThomThom, Here is what I planned to do: nEntsBefore=Sketchup.active_model.entities.length Sketchup.active_model.entities.add_faces_from_mesh(m) nEntsAfter=Sketchup.active_model.entities.length arrayOfNewFaces=[] nEntsBefore.upto(nEntsAfter-1) { |i| next if ent=Sketchup.active_model.entities[i]; arrayOfNewFaces.push(ent) } Your code is mush more simple than mine

Just trap for any non-standard characters and replace them with _ It's done all of the time in things like OBJ exporters...

@tig said: comparing strings is probably slower It is. Much slower! At all times avoid string comparisons if possible.