Vertices and selection

alexschreyer

I am sure someone else has this figured out already: How can I move a vertex with Ruby? The transform! method is not available with a vertex, otherwise this should work:

vertices[0].transform! transformation

Also, is it possible to select an object by its ID?

Cheers,
Alex

mitcorb

Are you speaking in terms of selecting vertices rather than faces or edges? If so, you might note that ThomThom is working on a script with vertices as a selection set.

alexschreyer

I saw thomthom's plugin but what he does is way beyond what I want to do. I just want to address an object (edge, face, vertex) by ID (not by clicking!) and then transform it.

Cheers,
Alex

scottlininger

Alex,

You can transform vertices by using Entities.transform_entities method.

There is no built in way to get at something by id. You could populate a hash yourself, though. Something like...

entities_by_id = {}
some_id = nil
for ent in Sketchup.active_model.entities
  entities_by_id[ent.entityID.to_s] = ent
  some_id = ent.entityID.to_s
end

# And then get back to stuff like this
my_last_ent = entities_by_id[some_id]

Cheers,

thomthom

As Scott said, Entities.transform_entities, or by Entities.transform_by_vectors.

Entities.transform_entities is good when you have one transformation you want to apply to all entities.

Entities.transform_by_vectors is good when you want to transform a set entities each differently.

@alexschreyer said:

I am sure someone else has this figured out already: How can I move a vertex with Ruby? The transform! method is not available with a vertex, otherwise this should work:

For Vertices, Edges and Faces you tell the containing Entities collection to perform the transformation.
Only Groups and ComponentInstances has .transform! methods which can be used directly on the object.

@alexschreyer said:

Also, is it possible to select an object by its ID?

You mean entity.entityID ? Or some other form of identification?
Maybe this could be better answered if you described the scenario you want to solve?

alexschreyer

Thanks Thom and Scott for the suggestions. I'll try it out later today.

@thomthom said:

You mean entity.entityID ? Or some other form of identification?
Maybe this could be better answered if you described the scenario you want to solve?

The scenario would be to have a model with nothing selected. The script would then select an entity and apply a transformation based on me giving it some ID. This is easy if I select by type (e.g. "all faces") and apply the transformation on all of them but I am wondering if I can do it with an individual selection by ID.

Cheers,
Alex

thomthom

I'm still confused to exactly what this ID is.

How are you determining which entity to transform?

From a user perspective, what would you do?

Chris Fullmer

What kind of "ID" do you mean Alex? Entities have ID's associated with them, but they are not kept from session to session. So if you make a hash of ID's and then save them to reuse, you will have to rebuild it to match your saved list of hashes each time. That is the only way ID's seem like they would really help you. And from what I hear, that adds a LOT of size to the skp file, because you have to tag each entity that you are tracking with your own ID to match back to your database.

Chris

alexschreyer

Thanks for the replies. I'll have to get back to this later, so please don't think I am ignoring you...

Cheers,
Alex