In a former life, I founded and ran an Xbase (dBASE, Clipper, FoxPro, ...) aftermarket company. It was successful as we had two excellent marketing channels. The Clipper community had about 40 active clubs, nationwide. A press release about your latest and 40 stamps was all it took to appear in 40 newsletters. There was also a small magazine, DataBased Advisor that was read avidly by Xbasers. A full page ad wasn't expensive and almost every reader was your potential buyer. I'm trying to think of ways to reach my audience: SketchUp newbies. Best I'm coming up with is to turn promptly to treeware, as the newbie might head to Amazon when s/he finds out that SU has a bit of a learning curve. Treeware in the age of YouTube.

This could be interesting: Entities.intersect_with http://code.google.com/intl/nb/apis/sketchup/docs/ourdoc/entities.html#intersect_with Also means you need a real Face to intersect your lines with. But it will correctly intersect faces that has holes in it. You'd need to create a temporarily face (inside a group I'd recommend) large enough to cover the entities you want to intersect. You could make it as large as the scene boundary. Then iterate over the faces you want to intersect, filter out those edges where the vertices lie on your intersecting face. Intersect the faces with your intersect_face.

You will need to create a tool class that lets you right click on a component. Then it should check that component to see if it is one of yours, probably by checking for an attribute_dictionary that should put on your special components. I'll write up a quick example of how to amke a tool that right clicks, Chris

If only the 3D drawing methods would draw something other than solid black fill...

Also my 2D Polyline Edit Tool effectively lets you relocate a Polyline's Vertices by picking on them and their new location, one at a time... See its code for how it does those transformations, with a 'ghost polyline' till you end it...

Tossed everything, went "mushin", empty mind, back to the api, and found in one line, exactly what I was trying to do: new_transformation = Geom::Transformation.new(point,vector_z) Sigh.....what was I thinking before?-(, Thanks for trying to help.

The right-hand rule: imagine holding the face's normal vector [axis' if you will] in your right-hand, with you thumb pointing in the + direction. Your fingers will curl counter-clockwise. That rule applies to a face's outer_loop's vertices array. It also applies to rotations etc about an axis etc... It's opposite for any inner_loops vertices array - i.e. clockwise. It doesn't matter which direction/order the face's edges were originally drawn: an array of the loop's vertices is always returned ordered in that particular way - ccw or cw. The vertices' order does affect the face's normal when drawing faces: however, SUp does seem to have that overriding rule to draw a face with its normal pointing down IF the face's Z=0 !!!

I have no experiences with .so files.

I hope Mr. Someone comes back and finished the job...

Where is the Su2SmallPt.rb :-), Nice post.

Updated all of the tests so only load is not built in methods... http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?p=188743#p188743

Martin is/was making it far too complex... it even converted the group to a pointless component ? KISS... Jim's example is the better way to do it... Explode the group at the end if desired...

Not something you can make changes to existing tools. But when creating your own tool it should be possible.

Again, I have to recommend Firebug Lite. It has a full featured Javascript console plus HTML DOM and CSS browsers. It works on IE, Safari, Firefox and Chrome and you can add it to any HTML doc with only one (long) line: <a href="javascript&#058;var firebug=document.createElement('script');firebug.setAttribute('src','http://getfirebug.com/releases/lite/1.2/firebug-lite-compressed.js');document.body.appendChild(firebug);(function(){if(window.firebug.version){firebug.init();}else{setTimeout(arguments.callee);}})();void(firebug);">Firebug Lite</a> http://getfirebug.com/lite.html

I think CouchDB is an interesting project, too.

Thanks Fredo. I've taken an interests into Bèzier patches. And while I could easily produce a patch using the @Last bezier.rb, I wanted to try to understand more about how it worked technically. That way I could eventually improve the method I use to create the patch, as at the moment I'm not sure if it's efficient the way I do it. But yea, Bèzier curves are really cool. Thanks for your feedback Fredo.

Sorry, was a response to this post ...... Jim Global Moderator Posts: 2091 Joined: Mon Nov 12, 2007 10:13 pm Name: Jim Foltz Operating system: XP Pro SP3 SketchUp version: Google Pro 7.1 .....but the thoughts are free - also my finewood

Better indeed

@thomthom said: @tig said: Thomthom Grumpy... I came across grumpy? The English phrase is you were 'terse' [avvisende]... or 'a little short' [litt kort]... just like your old school teacher might be when you ask a seemingly stupid question or you are doing something that is obviously not right [to him] AND he has a hangover etc etc

... tr=Geom::Transformation.new(group.transformation.origin) instance=group.entities.add_instance(definition,tr) or work out where the insertion_point is relative to the group's origin something like... insertion_point=[x,y,z] insertion_point.transform!(group.transformation.inverse)###??? tr=Geom::Transformation.new(group.insertion_point) instance=group.entities.add_instance(definition,tr) A group's origin is at ORIGIN [0,0,0] even when it's miles away so you need to move any insert backwards ? This is untried but my first thoughts...