[Plugin] Perpendicular Face Tools (UPDATED 26-03-09)

Chris Fullmer · 7 Jun 2010, 14:38

hmm, interesting. I'll set up to a mm template and try it to se if I get the same error.

charly2008 · 11 Jul 2010, 12:36

Dear Chris,

I used your tool extensively in the beta test of fredos Curviloft. It's a great combination. but at times appears a little error. Some objects are rotated to 180 degrees. At two or three objects, this is not a problem to turn the objects by hand.

Charly

Chris Fullmer · 11 Jul 2010, 13:14

Hi Charly, I never did quite get some of that stuff worked out. When I wrote this I knew very little about vectors/ But, I was aware of the possibility of it adding unwanted rotation to faces. So I built in the ability to rotate a face immediatly after placing it by using the up arrow key.

So if a face is rotated wrong, hit the up arrow key to rotate it 90 degrees. Hope that helps,

Chris

charly2008 · 11 Jul 2010, 21:56

Thanks Chris for your quick response. Your tip is a good help.

Charly

DIEGO-RODRIGUEZ · 1 Oct 2010, 15:44

hi chris
long use this tool and I would like to ask you some suggestions.

square perperdicular:
if I enter a single value (for ejemmplo 20) = draws a square of 20 (as it works now)
but if I enter two values (eg 20,30) draws a rectangle of 20x30
circle perperdicular:
add opcion of oval
if I enter two values (eg 20,30) draws a oval of 20x30
custom face:
add opción for scale
if I enter /2 draws face , half the size of the original face
if I enter *2 draws face , twice the size of the face of origin

is it possible?

Chris Fullmer · 1 Oct 2010, 18:57

That would be possible to add. I"m not sure how to handle the fact that different places use . and , differntly in numbers. Is there a way to determine what the decimal delimeter is for a user's location or something?

DIEGO-RODRIGUEZ · 1 Oct 2010, 19:11

using the (,) between numbers. is a performance equal to that of native sketchup.
just for that reason I put as an example (30,20 in visor vcv) for a 30cmx20cm rectangle

Edson · 16 Oct 2010, 23:09

chris,

there seems to be some incompatibility with SU8 as the toolbar does not appear and I cannot find PFT in your folder in the plugins menu, even though all the files are in the plugins folder.

Dave R · 16 Oct 2010, 23:24

Edson, I have these tools on my Mac with SU8 Pro and they work fine. Have you ticked the box for Perpendicular Face tools in Preferences>Extensions?

Edson · 17 Oct 2010, 00:40

@dave r said:

Edson, I have these tools on my Mac with SU8 Pro and they work fine. Have you ticked the box for Perpendicular Face tools in Preferences>Extensions?

nope. I looked for it in View>Tool Palettes and it was not there. but doing what you suggested did the trick. thanks for reminding me of that.

Dave R · 17 Oct 2010, 00:44

It's easy to forget having to tick the boxes. More so these days because you don't have to do it for every toolbar and for those you do, it's only done once until you install the next version of SU. Glad that fixed it.

Chris Fullmer · 17 Oct 2010, 06:04

Glad you got it fixed Edson - Thanks Dave!

Chris

dem · 12 Feb 2011, 14:56

Sketchup crushing very often, when use Ctrl+Z after this tools

Chris Fullmer · 13 Feb 2011, 01:46

Hmm, that is not good. I'll look into it. Thanks for the notice, I'll let you know if I find anything,

Chris

bestmate · 16 Mar 2011, 17:50

What a cracking tool Chris your comitment never stops amazing me Phil

frascati · 3 Apr 2011, 17:27

Would anyone kindly help me install this in Linux?

I'm running Linux Mint 10 on an HP 8510W with
Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 Processor (Santa Rosa, 2.2GHz, 4MB L2 Cache, 800MHz FSB)
256MB NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M Workstation GPU
15.4” WSXGA

I installed Sketchup 7.0 with Wine installer. It's working quite well for me so far.

I have found this ruby-script instruction on a page dedicated to Sketchup Linux users...

@unknownuser said:

bug 16511, fixed as of wine-1.1.11: To use the Ruby scripts (sketchup.google.com/download/rubyscripts.html) you'll need to convert them from DOS format to Unix format. (e.g. sudo apt-get install tofromdos; dos2unix -f parametric.rb windows.rb)

... but am pretty new to linux and not certain how to proceed.

Chris Fullmer · 3 Apr 2011, 18:35

hmmm, I don't know. I am not a Linux person. Someone around here should be able to help I think thought.

frascati · 3 Apr 2011, 19:10

Hello Chris.

I second every accolade in this thread. What a great tool! I read and read tutorials until I was quite certain not to embarrass myself before asking how to accomplish this. It's such a fundamental need that I was certain that I was overlooking the obvious somewhere. When I was directed to your plugin I was pretty astonished that Sketchup does not do this natively somehow. Thank you VERY much for your work.

I asked some time back about why subsequent versions of Sketchup don't incorporate more of the most useful tools developed by users. I recall that it was said to be a 'good question'. Do you happen to know? It's not as if it would add too significantly to the size of the download.

thomthom · 4 Apr 2011, 07:53

@frascati said:

I asked some time back about why subsequent versions of Sketchup don't incorporate more of the most useful tools developed by users. I recall that it was said to be a 'good question'. Do you happen to know? It's not as if it would add too significantly to the size of the download.

As a user I prefer to be able to choose myself - the plugins I find useful isn't the same as the next person.
As a developer - SketchUp plugins often go through frequent updates, so any bundled plugin would be out of date by the time it ships.

On the other hand - it'd be great if we could have a plugin repository where we could search, install, uninstall plugins from within SketchUp.

frascati · 4 Apr 2011, 17:12

Finally solved this, hope this helps if any other Linux users stop by here. Rather than repeat a lot I'll refer to the thread....
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=69740

@unknownuser said:

On the other hand - it'd be great if we could have a plugin repository where we could search, install, uninstall plugins from within SketchUp.

That would be VERY nice.

This is one thing that I'm really pleased with so far with this "fat" (by linux standards) Linux distro called Mint. There is a wealth of such repositories within the installation for navigating and installing with a minimum of fuss many many utilities. Usually when a Linux tool is discovered on the web I just have to open the "package manager" in Mint and type the name of it into search and it's already there. I just click to download and automatically install it and start using it.

This plugin for Sketchup has been the first real baffler for me, but it turned out to be a pretty simple fix after all. I'm finding that that's usually the case with Mint. Half a dozen hard-core linux people will give you daunting command line instructions but eventually someone will come along to tell you that the solution is actually only two clicks away.