[Plugin] Color by Z (Updated August 27th, 2009)

Chris Fullmer

THats a nice arrow their John. It took me a while to find it on the image, but once I clicked on the image to expand it, it all made sense. Very nice. And your mountain looks great too! It works out really nice with white at the top that changes quickly into a brown and works its way down to give a nice snow capped mountain appearance

Chris

xrok1

@daniel s said:

SU7 has an option called Combine Textures (The Combine Textures menu item combines separate textures on adjacent co-planar faces into a single larger texture. This feature also, optionally, removes edges between co-planar faces to reduce the polygon count for the model as a whole. Context-click on multiple selected parallel faces, with at least one face having a texture, and select Combine Textures to create a texture which is unique to that set of faces.)
This is a great tool, but it will be more usefull if it`s extended into curved surfaces. This Color by Z or the Tools On Surface are examples of plugins that will be benefit.

Daniel S

how can you get to this tool? i can't find it, tried RC menu?

Chris Fullmer

Here's a video on using combine textures.

[flash=727,635:2s0w7uxd]http://www.chrisfullmer.com/chrisfullmer/forums/combine_textures.swf[/flash:2s0w7uxd]

Chris

xrok1

thats sweet. thank you very much for that. coincidentally you just answer a another question, i was trying to figure out how to make a painted wall texture for skindigo, but i couldn't figure out how get SK to UV map surfaces with just white material on it so i could apply displacement. now after watching your vid i figure i can just make unique my material then it should be uv'ed.

thank you

linea

Good idea Chris, thanks

urgen

...nice idea Chris!

solo

Cool and thanks, this should come in handy.

JClements

It never occurred to me to project a gradient color onto a terrain, great idea.

Mt Hood gone Active Vulcanic AGAIN 2.jpg

However, I do project gradient transparency along with gradient color onto a single surface to make arrow-shaped objects and "swooshes" that indicate direction or motion.

Gradient Arrow in SKP.jpg

Mt Hood gone Active Vulcanic AGAIN 2.skp

Gradient Arrow.skp

Chris Fullmer

Solo, was that made with the plugin or with the image gradient method?

Chris

Gaieus

Hi Chris and all,

I haven't been able to drop by the Ruby Dept for days so I might be a bit late... Do you know however Didier's "paint_altitude_faces.rb" by any chance? It works kind of similar (only with the gradients of the same colour):
http://www.crai.archi.fr/RubyLibraryDepot/Ruby/em_ren_page.htm
There's also a demonstration video supplied.

All in all, yours is a very cool plugin with this texture gradient!

Chris Fullmer

Yeah, I have a tendency to not look around to see if similar scripts exist before starting one (I think there were already about 4 version of a random pushpull script before I wrote mine, for example). Mostly because I'm still just writing these for the experience and they each teach me a new little portion of the Ruby SketchUp API. But I definitely need to watch out for that before I embark on any seriously large and in-depth projects I suppose!

So I tried to check his out, and its only painting black faces on my model regardless of what color I select. I suppose it might be a units thing? but I changed my model units to metric with no luck. Also the avi file wouldn't play for me so I couldn't see it in action. I even tried playing it with mPlayer, which generally plays anything you throw at it. But that didn't work. It came out all garbled.

Chris

thomthom

@chris fullmer said:

So I tried to check his out, and its only painting black faces on my model regardless of what color I select. I suppose it might be a units thing? but I changed my model units to metric with no luck. Also the avi file wouldn't play for me so I couldn't see it in action.

Ditto.

Gaieus

Okay guys, don't ask me. I just remembered seeing the ruby in the list about two ears ago (never tried). Maybe it has problems with SU 6+? The video plays to me and Didier uses a blue colour for the demo.

chan

This is just great Chris. Thank you so much.
I deal with many diffrent urban projects and
I clearly see that Skechup with smart programmers like yourself
has great potential in evolving into sth not only for visual outcomes but
for urban analysis.
Color by Z is already a great start isn't it?
Could this kind of approach broadens to....
**- analyze daytime shadow coverage ratio

density analysis(maybe by comparing # of lines certain area contains)
open view condition by z**
and so on and so on...

If anyone is interested, I would love to discuss about it(just can't program it ;( ).
Thanks again Chris.

Chris Fullmer

"analyze daytime shadow coverage ratio"

That is one that has been on my mind lately. I just can't figure out how to figure out the percentage calculations because there is no easy way to get that data out of SU I think. So I would essentially have to find get the location data from the model, and evaluate each face myself using the sun angles every 15 minutes or something and run that on each face etc. I'm really not sure how that would go or if its even feasible. It would be cool if it was.

Chris

rinaldo

Erro ao carregar o arquivo clf_color_by_z.rb
No such file to load -- progressbar.rb

TIG

@rinaldo said:

Erro ao carregar o arquivo clf_color_by_z.rb
No such file to load -- progressbar.rb

Download progressbar.rb free from SMustard...

snorky

doesn't work for me.

Error; #<ArgumentError; comparison of Float with nil failed>
(eval);44;in `>'
(eval);44;in `update'

Chris Fullmer

You need to have progressbar from http://www.smustard.com installed also. Go install the plugin and then see if the plugin works after that,

Chris

PS - thanks for posting the error!

snorky

@chris fullmer said:

You need to have progressbar from http://www.smustard.com installed also. Go install the plugin and then see if the plugin works after that,

Chris

PS - thanks for posting the error!
I have it...
sorry for uncompleted quoting, this is right error:

Error; #<ArgumentError; comparison of Float with nil failed>
(eval);44;in `>'
(eval);44;in `update'
C;/Program Files (x86)/Google/Google SketchUp 7/Plugins/clf_color_by_z.rb;140;in `colorbyz'
C;/Program Files (x86)/Google/Google SketchUp 7/Plugins/clf_color_by_z.rb;138;in `each'
C;/Program Files (x86)/Google/Google SketchUp 7/Plugins/clf_color_by_z.rb;138;in `colorbyz'
C;/Program Files (x86)/Google/Google SketchUp 7/Plugins/clf_color_by_z.rb;174
C;/Program Files (x86)/Google/Google SketchUp 7/Plugins/clf_color_by_z.rb;174;in `call'

and sorry for my poor enghish