Direction of Pushpull Is ?

[MartinRinehart]

ents = Sketchup.active_model.entities
f = ents.add_face ...
f.pushpull x

Which way does that pushpull?

[Jim]

Always in the direction of the face normal. Modify your question a little.

[Chris Fullmer]

Except if the face is lying flat on the ground. In that case, it is always pushpulled in the positive Z direction (upwards), regardless of its normal's direction.

[TIG]

So [usually] if it faces up it pulls 'up' and if it faces down it pushes down...
If you always want it to be pulled 'up' then face.reverse! if face.normal.z<0; face.pushpull(dist)
but if you want it pushpulled in the direction of the face's normal then plain
face.pushpull(dist) will work except if face normal==[0,0,1] and face.bounds.min.z==0 in which case adjust accordingly...

[Jim]

I didn't want to spoil it - Martin seems like the kind of guy who enjoys figuring things out.

I think it was trick question.

[MartinRinehart]

@jim said:

I think it was trick question.

No quite. I knew, before I asked, that the answer was "positive distance is often toward the outside of the face" and that a fresh rectangle in the rg plane was an exception. What I didn't know was if the latter was THE exception or one member of a class of exceptions.

[Jim]

Yes, but I am not seeing any exception.

Using this code, I get the following model - one face pushed up, the other down.

model = Sketchup.active_model
entities = model.entities
selection = model.selection
selection.each {|e|
  if e.is_a? Sketchup;;Face
    e.pushpull(10)
  end
}

---

pptest.skp

[Chris Fullmer]

Well that's odd. I could have sworn that a face on the ground plane will always head upwards.

Chris

[MartinRinehart]

@chris fullmer said:

Well that's odd. I could have sworn that a face on the ground plane will always head upwards.

Me too. I just rectangled twice on the ground plane, reversed one of the faces.

This, from memory, was what I typed into the Ruby Console:

ents = Sketchup.active_model.entities
f = []
ents.each { |e| f.push(e) if e.is_a? Sketchup;;Face }
f.each { |f| f.pushpull(10) }
 

Result: two rectangular parallelepipeds (that's pretentious for "box"), both with their blue dimensions ranging from 0 to 10.

So now we've really screwed this one down: always toward the outside face, except on the ground plane, but the exception doesn't apply to Jim.

Anyone happy with this?

[MartinRinehart]

@martinrinehart said:

Result: two rectangular parallelepipeds (that's pretentious for "box"), both with their blue dimensions ranging from 0 to 10.

Totally wrong! Went back and did it again, carefully, being sure to orbit around and under. Jim is right. Sorry, Jim.

[Jim]

Maybe version 6 behaved differently? I can check...

No, 2 faces on the RG plane with opposite normals, +Z and -Z, each pushpulled +10, each extruded in the direction of the normal - so one went up, the other went down.