I was needing something like this last week.. And while thinking how it might be done, it would seem an elegant way might be to write it so an arbitrary fragment of Ruby is evaluated with known arguments. You could have some "presets" - as you do - but they would simply be preset Ruby fragments that are eval-ed on the arguments. Users could add any Ruby fragment they liked to extend it. two cents worth and all that.. Adam

I'm taking a guess you are using the free version of Sketchup, right? Cause If I understand you correctly, what you are asking for is what Dynamic Components are used for. You assign different attributes and change them accordingly. I don't think any plugin developper is "up to the mood" of creating a new DC component plugin. However a special "plant" plugin with different attributes etc is fully possible to create! But then again it have to be something extra to compete with DC's.. OR maybe to satisfy "nonpro" versions of Sketchup.

You rock as allways! Thanks again!

Yea, I wish we could do that. I've been trying to lobby for a way to have a responsive progressbar and cancel button in SU. Still hoping for it. Many hours has been spend by good plugin authors trying to find a good solution for this. But when it comes to it, it's something that needs to be built into SU in order to make the UI responsive.

To do what you want my 'Grow' tool will copy a selected component and rotate it about an axis... this is in X-axis only = 10nr @2m c/c @5degrees [for clarity] but your requirements would work too [image: Capture.PNG] see here http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?p=324331#p324331

Thanks You might consider adding 'filtering' to the tool changes, otherwise doing 'transparent operations' like orbit/pan/zoom will also 'beep' annoyingly...

These scripts are very useful. However, I am wondering if it is possible to go further with this to help me with what I use sketchup for. I draw a 3d floor plan of a house which is basically just lots of boxes/rooms adjoining each other. For each room I need the area of each wall and its orientation. However the orientation is from the perspective of being inside that room. So say I am inside the room and I am looking at the wall in question, the orientation of the wall is basically the direction I am facing, for example North. If I was in the room adjoining and am now looking at the same wall but from the other side of it, the orientation is now the opposite direction ie south. These scripts dont quite cater for this and I am wondering if it is even possible to make such a script. So when i click on one side of a wall its orientation is one direction but if I click on the other side of it, its orientation is the opposite direction.

You're right TIG, thank you

Adam ended up doing a 0.5 instead of 2... i think thats what you meant? or did i get my x/y's the wrong way... pt0.offset!(ya,interval*0.5) either got it I'll post further questions to the plugin page

Yes there is: http://www.smustard.com/script/GroupByTexture

This tool you did are really interesting. But I was wrong about the reason why I ask for this plugin. The problem was that when I render a scene in V-ray, everything was dark. I rendering from far away and I see that I had a huge object involving the whole scene. I thought it was a hidden object that this tool could make me find out. But this was not the problem. The problem, as I discovered later, was on "scale definition." The plugin for V-ray for some reason did not translate correctly the object as I seen in the scene, but according to the scale of the original object. Your plugin could also automatically define all the objects as "scale definition" as we see in the scene??? I tested this script in the the scene I'm working on, and could not see any results, because the scene I'm working on is very large and took too long time, so I had to kill the sketchup. Another thing I think will be great is the possibility of being able to choose what kind of object it takes from the "hidden world" and brings to our reality. Thank you TIG.

Try instance.transformation.origin

Thomthom beat me two it but I'd typed it so I post it anyway A plane can be determined by an on-plane point and a normal vector, or an on-plane point and two in-plane vectors, or three on-plane points... See this http://code.google.com/apis/sketchup/docs/ourdoc/geom.html for notes on plane - a plane is set/got by an array of a point3d and a vector3d so plane=[point_on_face, face.normal], OR an array of four values. The array of 4 numbers gives the coefficients of a plane equation as follows: Ax + By + Cz + D = 0 It consists of four coefficients A, B, C and D, where D is the constant term The plane's normal vector is [Ax,By,Cz] If D!=0 you can divide everything by D to get a + b + c = 1 etc... ... this is a good source http://www.astro.uvic.ca/~tatum/celmechs/celm4.pdf You don't really need to do too much with the plane's raw data - there are several API methods to get the distance a point is from a plane, or project a point perpendicularly onto a plane, make a plane from three points, find the 'line' formed by the intersection of two planes, find the intersect point of a line and a plane [a line is NOT an edge line=edge.line or line=[edge.start.position, edge.start.position,vector_to(edge.end.position)] (i.e. a point and a vector - a 'line' is infinitely long, as is a plane in two directions) etc etc.

Thanks once I used to_m I got the correct value.

You could try the "Archiver" plugin that TIG produces, as I believe that it does something similar to what you're describing. I've never gotten it to work quite right, but then I haven't really invested much time into actually learning how to use it properly. http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=18179 Hope that helps, Matt

Cool, thanks Chris.

Yeah, that would help. BUT, I came to think of some unlogic in my ideas. And that is if you for ex set an attribute that says the group is locked. And then you unlock the group by setting group=unlocked. How to tell the state before? There might be methods dealing with this but I can't give an answer to that unless digging more deeply. Someone more experienced with classes and attributes might pitch in. Sorry, bout that.

First post in its thread - get that from the Plugins Index [BIG red button above here]

In all the years I have used SketchUp, I have never been comfortable using the ruby console. I use the ruby plugin ruby script all the time, but accessing stuff from the console. . .just seemed like uncharted territory for me. forgive me. . .I'm so ashamed. anyway, I won't lose sleep over it. I seem to have all the stuff in the right place. It worked fine in V7, but whatever. . .TIG's got a similar tool and I don't use this all that much anyway. Thanks for the response. D edit at TIG. . . @tig said: Why not post in the original thread? I don't know. . it was old. . .I'm dumb. . .it's Friday. . all kinds of reasons None of em good.

@unknownuser said: Dave: There's another plugin which just creates layers which are hidden on all but the current scene but I can't find the link for it at the moment. I think it's "AddHiddenLayer" http://sketchuptips.blogspot.com/2007/08/add-hidden-layer.html