BOX SELECTION - ruby request
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@chris fullmer said:
I think he meant in the ruby script. That's a good question. I suppose define it as a bounding box and iterate through the model to determine what entities bounds lie within the selection bounding box.
I suppose that could become time intensive always having to go through all the entities in the model like that. Should work though, right?
Chris
I think so. I'm wondering if we could save some processing time and not check the entities inside groups/components, instead just using the group/component's boundingbox? Only checking the active entities.
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Ahh true, and I think that could help immensely.
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@chris fullmer said:
Yeah, but what if you DON'T want everything. You just want the first 15' of 100's of feet deep geometry. That is what I was thinking he meant.
You have a point there.
But if you wear a hat...
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The temporary 'box' [group] you draw will have a 3D boundingbox [let's call it bigbox].
You then test for all model.active_entities that either have...
some part of their boundingbox within the bigbox - mimics right-drag, OR
their entire boundingbox within the bigbox - mimics left-drag...............Easy-peasy...
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I was wondering if it was possible to just draw the selection box using a Tool class. Instead of using actual geometry?
But you can't draw faces, only lines right? So a dummy group with transparent material is maybe more usable? I just imagine that it's useful to see transparent faces of the selectionbox to visually see how it intersects the model... -
I think you could define 3dpoints and use those to define the bounding box. And then visually represent it like Thom says in a tool draw method using view.draw GL_QUADS pts.
I think the drawback there though is that I don't know if you can define the drawing color as partially transparent. So it would be a solid box.
Maybe the actual geometry method is better?
Chris
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@thomthom said:
I just imagine that it's useful to see transparent faces of the selectionbox to visually see how it intersects the model...
thats what i imagine, too. maybe could be a sphere too.
so if some of you think about realizing this, could look like this:- draw box / sphere
- group
- convert group to "bigbox"
- delete all entities within the box
- with message: "Do you want to keep the box? Y / N"
so you can simply erase with the "3d-eraser" parts next to the erased area...
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Ahh, actually deleting the geometry inside is a whole different tool. The discussion here has only been covering the idea of creatin a new selection tool. Fortunately for you, what you want already exists. Its called booltools.rb. Check it out.
Another way to do it manually would be to create your box and group it, move it in place, then right click on it and choose "intersect with model" and then delete what you don't want. But booltools will do that automatically for you.
Chris
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Just grouping and intersecting is not working, i wanted to erase all closed objects and / or lines within the box- and leave bigger surrounding faces intersecting the "bigbox" untouched.
A box selection-tool would be really helpful too, thats what i imagined first, too. Having a box, selecting line-clusters- then they get nicely blue and i can erase them all- or move or scale or whatever.
I think, the booltools is just a more direct way to group -> intersect -> erase, right?
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Yes, booltools is a more direct way to do the intersect with model actions.
So if you are still interested in a 3d selection tool, that should be do-able. a sphere might be too complex for now though,
Chris
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Thinking about this, bounding boxes always work on the x,y,z axis, right? So it won't work because the bounding box of a cube that is drawn off axis, will not actually match its faces.
Chris
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Make a virtual one out of the vertices?
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Nah, because if you add your 8 vertices to it, it will still align itself to the global axes, and not to the vertices. This is from the API
@unknownuser said:
Bounding boxes are three-dimensional boxes (eight corners), aligned with the global axes, that surround entities within your model
.Hmm, but thinking about it, components bounding boxes rotate with them. So is there a way to rotate a bounding box, or at least use a rotated component's bounding box for the selection testing? That might be promising.
Chris
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Nope, I just tested it. A rotated compenent appears to have a rotated bounding box, but that is just a visual thing. When you get the component.bounds, it is not rotated, it is still aligned to the world axes.
EDIT: Which just means that using .bounds won't work for this 3d selection box idea, but it should still be possible.
Chris
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Isn't there a
local_boundsmethod? -
Not that I'm seeing in the API. That would sure be handy though!
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I remember it being mentioned in the initial SU API Blog of the SU7 announcement. Though not what it was related to.
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sure enough:
Measure your groups regardless of their transform
untransformed_bb = my_group.local_boundsThat should be interesting to play with. I've gotta get some sleep though.
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Only for groups it turns out. From the Docs:
@unknownuser said:
The local_bounds method returns the BoundingBox object that defines the size of the group in an untransformed state. Useful for determining the original width, height, and depth of a group regardless of its current position or scale. For components, you can get a similar result by checking my_instance.definition.bounds.
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... So, make a temporary group of the instance and get the local_bounds if that, then explode it back as it was...
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