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[Plugin] Shape Bender Beta

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  • C Offline
    Chris Fullmer
    last edited by 8 Dec 2009, 05:13

    Sorry to say that you are just running into the glitches of the script unfortunately. But there are things you can do to help a bit.

    If you are getting holes, its possible that the model is too small for SketchUp. It struggles to make small faces. Try scaling larger by 10 or 100 times. That might help.

    The extra lines that come in are from SketchUp deforming geometry on top of my script deforming it. The best thing to do is to clean it up by softening those lines. Use the eraser tool and hold ctrl (or option or something on the Mac). That will soften them and they disappear. Also, some lines get hidden during the bending that should not be hidden. So you will want to find those and then un soften them.

    Also, try adding segmentation to the arc. That could help. Or line up your text slightly differently with the straight line. Those kinds of things can help, when you are able to do them. Its painful though when you are working on something that does not allow you to move the geometry as it must line up with something and the bending is just not working right.

    Like I always warn, this script is great, but its not perfect and its full of little glitches. So it as best you can. And it might require a bit of clean up afterwards. Good luck,

    Chris

    Lately you've been tan, suspicious for the winter.
    All my Plugins I've written

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    • C Offline
      Chris Fullmer
      last edited by 8 Dec 2009, 05:16

      OH also, I meant to add that text is often difficult to bend because its mesh is not as clean as it looks. You might have some better luck also if you select all the geometry of the text, right click and choose "explode curve". That might help the bending.

      Chris

      Lately you've been tan, suspicious for the winter.
      All my Plugins I've written

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      • E Offline
        Edwardo
        last edited by 14 Dec 2009, 03:54

        Great Plugin Chris!

        I do have one question: is there anyway for me to take a finite length of material and bend it on a curve without stretching it?

        For example: I really want to use your plugin to build this plexiglass wall. The Plexiglass is 36' long and 8' tall when flat. I want to know what it would look like if I bent it on different radii.

        I drew some various arcs, and the shape bender does indeed bend my plexiglass wall to match the arc ... but it stretches it out to make it fit. Is there anyway I can use your plugin to take my plexiglass wall and match it to that arc without stretching it?

        Thanks very much Chris

        EDWARDO
        "build it / destroy it"

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        • C Offline
          Chris Fullmer
          last edited by 14 Dec 2009, 04:01

          Yes, you can control that by figuring out how long the arc is, then scale the shape to be the same length. Then draw the line to be the same length as the shape. That should help reduce the stretching. Also, draw the line underneath the shape, and line up exatly in the middle. That might help even a little more.

          Sorry its not simpler. I know it can be tricky to find the length of the curve.

          Chris

          Lately you've been tan, suspicious for the winter.
          All my Plugins I've written

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          • J Offline
            jeff hammond
            last edited by 14 Dec 2009, 04:34

            if you'd rather not scale down the shape, this online calculator makes it pretty easy to figure out chord length etc..
            http://www.handymath.com/cgi-bin/arc18.cgi?submit=Entry

            [edit] actually, i think if i were wanting to do something similar as edwardo (testing the look at multiple radii etc.), i'd probably do something like:

            draw an arc longer than necessary.. get its length via entity info.. draw a line the same length that's included in the group to be bent..
            then draw my shapebender line underneath that one etc..
            seems like the quickest way to do a bunch of tests.. after i found the right radius, i'd fine tune accordingly to do the final bend.

            i dunno, just thinking out loud πŸ˜„

            [something like this]
            somthinglikethis.jpg

            dotdotdot

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            • C Offline
              charly2008
              last edited by 14 Dec 2009, 12:34

              Hi,

              Shape bender is one of the best tools. You can make so many incredible things with it. The arched roof element was also done so. There were also some holes, this I had to repair manually, No Problem. Nevertheless, it saves a lot of time.

              Karlheinz


              Curved Roof3.jpg

              He who makes no mistakes, makes nothing

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              • E Offline
                Edwardo
                last edited by 14 Dec 2009, 18:28

                What an awesome calculator Jeff! This is a real time saver.

                Now, I just need to find a plugin that will help divide up my model into material sizes. See, the reason I've been usuing sketchup is because I do set construction and many of the designers I work for need me to break apart their sketchup drwaing into construction plans. I used to use AutoCAD ... untill I discovered Layout πŸ˜„

                Anyone out there know of a plugin where I can select a surface and see it divided up into 4' x 8' sheets? This would be a great help when ordering materials ... and it would help me quickly figure out where my seams are and where to place my toggles etc.

                EDWARDO
                "build it / destroy it"

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                • A Offline
                  amonserrano
                  last edited by 14 Dec 2009, 22:25

                  Your new video is amazing... This is exactly what I need. Thank you

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                  • C Offline
                    charly2008
                    last edited by 15 Dec 2009, 15:22

                    I have a technical question to Chris.

                    Yesterday, i made this roof structure with randomly 12 objects. The objects were also evenly divided among 12 sections. This means each object belongs to one section.

                    Today I repeated the same with 3, 4 and 8 objects. These are also distributed to 12 sections. This means that a number of n-objects is always divided to 12 sections according to the sides of the arc. And the number of sides can not be changed.

                    Sorry, problem is solved! After inserting a new side value in the VCB i forgot to press Enter.


                    Curved Roof12.jpg


                    Curved Roof.jpg

                    He who makes no mistakes, makes nothing

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                    • bobpineoB Offline
                      bobpineo
                      last edited by 16 Dec 2009, 16:47

                      Chris,
                      Just came across your shape bender script, just great thanks for sharing.
                      Now I wonder how I got through my days of modeling without it!
                      Can't wait to check out your other scripts.
                      Bob

                      Bob Pineo, Design Develop LLC http://www.designdevelop.org.

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                      • C Offline
                        cupko
                        last edited by 5 Jan 2010, 23:43

                        Great plugin! πŸ˜„ πŸ‘ πŸ‘
                        Thanks!!

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                        • T Offline
                          t_gia197
                          last edited by 11 Jan 2010, 04:21

                          When I clik straight line, after that, arc line...the comand not show ACCEPT AND TRANSFORM. It show ACEEPT = ENTER. So that, I can't do it like your Tut. Can You help me.
                          Thanks
                          ( I'm using Vista x64 OS, SU ver. 7.0 pro )

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                          • C Offline
                            Chris Fullmer
                            last edited by 11 Jan 2010, 04:28

                            You should just be able to press the enter key and it will finish bending the shape. Does that work?, or are you having a different problem?

                            Chris

                            Lately you've been tan, suspicious for the winter.
                            All my Plugins I've written

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                            • M Offline
                              muchado
                              last edited by 11 Jan 2010, 16:25

                              @chris fullmer said:

                              Oh good, glad you found that post and were able to get it working.

                              I'm amazed at how many zip programs do not correctly unzip these plugins. The winzip I have at work is one of these that just ignores all folder and subfolder organization inside of .zip files, and just extracts everything to the same folder - very frustrating. And wreaks havoc on plugins dependent on folder organization...But glad its working. Of course, now you have to deal with all the bugs and issues involved with the script πŸ˜„

                              Chris

                              WinZip has a setting in options where you can choose to extract all files into one folder. I suspect that this is how many people have it set up.

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                              • A Offline
                                ayieartwork
                                last edited by 19 Jan 2010, 01:58

                                Hi.im new here.why i cant download the plugin.help2!

                                Intel Core i7-3930k with 16gb G.Skill Ripjaws

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                                • GaieusG Offline
                                  Gaieus
                                  last edited by 19 Jan 2010, 05:05

                                  @ayieartwork said:

                                  Hi.im new here.why i cant download the plugin.help2!

                                  Hi Fadhli,

                                  The plugin is attached to the first post of this topic. If you have problems, please, have a look at this announcement and delete your browser cookies:
                                  http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=19797

                                  Gai...

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                                  • D Offline
                                    driven
                                    last edited by 19 Jan 2010, 05:45

                                    Hi Chris,
                                    great tool, again...

                                    I'm working on a font stringer idea for 3D stainless steel printing and this does 90% of the basic component build beautifully, but as I need to now do this to a full character set, I'm was wondering if a few features could be added.
                                    the concept

                                    and this is just 'CopyRotate' version, but I have also done some test's with 'ComponentStringer' following more complex curves.

                                    the '%' are component (place holders)

                                    one of the steps that may be improved is after the second bend, of the 'letter' component, both ends need to be rotated back to the arc centre, I can't think of an easy way to do this and was thinking that being able to choose the arc centre as part of the parameters would be useful, or better still if "FindArcCentrePoint" could be utilized to find it's own on a multi-arc line.
                                    another is stipulating which is start and end on both lines (it changes from character to character even though I'm using locked templates and Copy-PastseInPlace' to generate them)

                                    To be honest I'm really just throwing some quick early ideas out there for any comments

                                    john
                                    EDIT
                                    with 'A' character replacement (not fully tweaked)

                                    learn from the mistakes of others, you may not live long enough to make them all yourself...

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                                    • D Offline
                                      driven
                                      last edited by 29 Jan 2010, 03:33

                                      Hi Chris,

                                      I had to do a job today using Shapebender to put text on tubes, as above, but more refined.

                                      to my surprise, I actually had all the dialogs, option to select ends ,ect before running, I really didn't know they were there.

                                      however, instead of making curved fonts, when I switched ends all it did was make an empty group, click again, another empty group, hit return another group.

                                      I had outliner on, which is how I saw the groups, but suspecting it might be the problem, tuned it off, same thing.

                                      working backward through my ruby instals, functionality returned when I removed the new VitrualWindSim ruby but without the end switching bits. because I really had a lot to do and the switching ability would speed it up, I stripped out all the rubies from my MacBook and only put what was needed for SB back in.

                                      No extra bits, added VWS got all the whistles , but no Bells, so I just thought I'd let you know. I'll grab the Mac console log when I finish up and see if it shows anything.

                                      john

                                      learn from the mistakes of others, you may not live long enough to make them all yourself...

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                                      • C Offline
                                        Chris Fullmer
                                        last edited by 29 Jan 2010, 19:17

                                        Very interesting. I'll try to look at the code and see if I can find anything that might conflict. Thanks for the notice,

                                        Chris

                                        Lately you've been tan, suspicious for the winter.
                                        All my Plugins I've written

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                                        • D Offline
                                          driven
                                          last edited by 29 Jan 2010, 20:16

                                          Chris,

                                          Does this help Mac Logs

                                          john

                                          without VWS log
                                          with VWS log
                                          with VBS can't get passed this point
                                          I can change ends at this stage, on complex models it can take time if you have 4 goes at it
                                          result

                                          learn from the mistakes of others, you may not live long enough to make them all yourself...

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