thanks, great explanation. I'm guessing nothing in parametric.rb is actually specifically changed to work with windows.rb and it is the windows.rb script that utilizes the methods and variables in the parametric.rb script. i'll keep working at it

Guys, thanks for the help. Chris, I will look very carefully at your example.

Thanks for answers. We ended up with approach similar to one of described by TIG: we have a separate layer with known and recognizable name and store all our geometry there. Any operation gets required data (actually it's only box size) from that layer and thus the problem with losing references to our stuff is solved. Of course problem with appearance of our geometry in saved modelы is still relevant, but it seems we can and will have to live with that (because after reopening the plugin catches existing geometry)...

@chris fullmer said: #3 - SketchUp does not give any control of normals. I think they always face the same direction as their face. Unless the edges is smoothed, then I think the normals average between the normals of the 2 faces. I think. Nope! The normals stay the same. You can see with if you use my Probes plugin - it lets you visualize the normals of faces and edges: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=21472#p180592

Transformations are still an enigma to me as well. But I just got a couple of books on vectors and transformations. ...but my right eye is still blurry after the operation so I can't concentrate on reading. Scariest of all is Observers. I wish you'd start using them more - so you could share my pain. (And join in on the rants )

I wrote this one a while back: http://www.crai.archi.fr/RubylibraryDepot/Ruby/EM/rot90.rb Rotates by 90 degrees around your choice of red|green|blue axes with a right click selection (can be mapped to a shortcut key). CB.

@tig said: splitting out the parts of the material's 'skm' file [which is really a 'zip' file] and taking the image file part, then making that as your new material's texture [with appropriate scaling] etc etc... Thanks. I was afraid of that.

If all of your faceme objets have shadows that fall onto a flat surfaces (vs. hitting walls, steps, etc.) then maybe you could make a dynamic component with two sub components. One sub-component is the face me object and it faces the camera. The other sub-component is a fake shadow. It is the same object but with translucent gray fill and it is on the ground. Then this would be set to face the sun vs. camera, and ideally would set the length of this to scale based on the hight of the sun angle. Maybe an alternative is to swap out your face me objects for real 3d objects just before exporting to Vray. If you don't like the look of these 3d objects you could always make a duplicate rendering with your faceme components and layer in Photoshop to mask these back in. You would just have to make sure the faceme objects are slightly larger than the 3d objects, and you run into issues of seeing the same object from multiple views, don't know how Vray deals with that and faceme objects.

Would a dynamic component work with random attribute built into it. But when you take your first instance and copy it to other locations, I don't know if it re-calculates the random#. I haven't really used the random feature before. But I can see where it would be nice to quickly click on component instances and have it randomly replaced with a component from a specific list. At the start of the ruby it could ask for names of components to include in the list, or maybe the ruby is written for rubys with specific prefix in their name.

@unknownuser said: I fixed it because of your very useful comments...

Thanks very much !

You have exited your Tool so the View refreshes... selectSelectionTool changes to that tool... No hack... No magic involved...

THanks Will check it out!

Here's my 2 cents strictly as a user. I tend to agree with TIG's view. But I think there may always be some overlap, because strict division of function or content requires discipline, and in the heat of the moment to express an issue, maybe the discipline takes back burner. I do peruse the dialogue in Developer's Forum when I see it in New Posts. I even scroll through the coding when it is displayed, in a vague hope that I can make sense out of the language conventions, or simply to marvel at how bizarre and foreign it is to conversational language.

You can't you must use something like Joint PushPull by Fredo6 or Projections by Didier Bur...

@tig said: .. but to do it within a script .. doh! .. actualy for me it's time to go to sleep

If by chance you use Firefox don't miss this one!(free) That pick image, part of screen, or screen and directly open online in a Toshop like! (free too) Advantage? : It's free and you are not obliged to at be home Fractal is'nt it? [image: D4d9_Screen.png]

I don't like the initials idea. I'm probably here early enough to lock up "mr" but Mike Roberts and Mary Ryan may not be so happy when they get here next year. The Java sort-of-standard proposed by Sun (inverted website names) never got popular. Too long. A ten-pound cure for a one-pound problem. I think that using the name of the plugin should be SOP. VisMap is in a module named VisMap. That means that before you release anything, you Google it, which is a good idea for a lot of reasons. A Wiki or Google doc re bad plugins would be most helpful. "X is bad" is not helpful, but "X is bad because..." would tell you what not to do so that you don't end up on the bad list.

@tig said: Now right-click on each of these new Materials in turn and pick Save_as, and save each of them as new skm file, say into the ../Materials/Wood folder. Thanks to you I not only got my woods into Wood, but I've also got a Materials dropdown that doesn't overflow and need scrolling, I've got A_Personal_Palette category with the stuff I use all the time and I've got rid of, for example, Colors_Named. A million thanks.

An example to the explanations of TIG. Karlheinz flatroomtest2.skp