Validate points for planar faces.

Djarlo · 27 Feb 2011, 23:31

Hey all, im pretty fresh to this forum, so i'll start with introducing myself
So yah, Im Djarlo, currently living in the Netherlands.
Cause i have a light form of autism Some coding languages are extremely easy for me to learn and others really difficult. with Ruby being one that is rather difficult.

I have several SketchUp related Application projects.

An application for making Skeleton hierarchies and animating them. (Alpha)
An Application to weight parts of the mesh to different Skeleton bones. (Beta)
And im working on an Importer currently.

All of the apps contain very little Ruby, and are handled by an external process.

I have an issue with the importer im working on, it works dine with xmf files exported with 3DS-Max and Blender, but not too well with files exported with SketchUp. unfortunately the creator of that exporter suddenly dissapeared years ago without ever finishing it and its a rbs, so theres nothing to be done there.

The problem is it wrongly exports certain lines as faces, ofc. those are not planar faces.

My plugin does this:

exe = Sketchup.find_support_file "xmftorb.exe", "Plugins/"
plugins_menu = UI.menu("Plugins")
menu = plugins_menu.add_submenu('XMF Importer')
xmfReload = menu.add_item('Import xmf') {
	File.delete(ENV["TMP"] + '\mesh.rb') if File.exists?(ENV["TMP"] + '\mesh.rb')
	UI.openURL exe
	until File.exists?(ENV["TMP"] + '\mesh.rb')
		sleep 10
	end
	load ENV["TMP"] + '\mesh.rb'
	File.delete(ENV["TMP"] + '\mesh.rb') if File.exists?(ENV["TMP"] + '\mesh.rb')
	}

The program lets you open a file and and creates a ruby script with the info from that file, the script looks like this:

i = Sketchup.active_model.entities.add_group
i.name = "Car[0]"
i.entities.add_face [-349.200000.mm, -658.578644.mm, 135.616973.mm], [349.200000.mm, -658.578644.mm, 58.578644.mm], [-349.200000.mm, -658.578644.mm, 58.578644.mm]
i.entities.add_face [349.200000.mm, -658.578644.mm, 58.578644.mm], [-349.200000.mm, -658.578644.mm, 135.616973.mm], [349.200000.mm, -658.578644.mm, 135.616973.mm]
i.entities.add_face [349.200000.mm, -658.578644.mm, 58.578644.mm], [349.200000.mm, -941.421356.mm, 185.453688.mm], [349.200000.mm, -941.421356.mm, 58.578644.mm]
i.entities.add_face [349.200000.mm, -941.421356.mm, 185.453688.mm], [349.200000.mm, -658.578644.mm, 58.578644.mm], [349.200000.mm, -658.578644.mm, 185.453688.mm]
i.entities.add_face [-349.200000.mm, 800.000000.mm, 341.421356.mm], [-349.200000.mm, 658.578644.mm, 185.453688.mm], [-349.200000.mm, 658.578644.mm, 341.421356.mm]
i.entities.add_face [-349.200000.mm, 658.578644.mm, 185.453688.mm], [-349.200000.mm, 800.000000.mm, 341.421356.mm], [-349.200000.mm, 658.578644.mm, 135.616973.mm]

Witch gets loaded and deleted again.
Obviously it error's out on non-planar faces.
I tried to ignore non-planar faces by adding an error handler in the exe.
if all Y is the same AND all X is the same = Ignore
if all Y is the same AND all Z is the same = Ignore
if all X is the same AND all Z is the same = Ignore

But that just takes care of the straight lines and not the diagonal ones

Is there any way of error handling available in Ruby?
or maybe theres some calculation on the points that can verify whether or not those points make a valid planar face.
Or perhaps some command in SketchUp that can check/verify the points?

thanks.

Gaieus · 28 Feb 2011, 07:46

Hi Djarlo and welcome!

There are already some nice examples of skeleton animation, see this post for example:
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=34530

Also, we have a Developers' Forum - your ruby topic would rather belong there. If you wish, I can move it and there, with the other scripters, you could improve your importer easier I believe.

Djarlo · 28 Feb 2011, 12:58

@gaieus said:

Hi Djarlo and welcome!

There are already some nice examples of skeleton animation, see this post for example:
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=34530

Also, we have a Developers' Forum - your ruby topic would rather belong there. If you wish, I can move it and there, with the other scripters, you could improve your importer easier I believe.

Hi, thanks for your reply, thats an interesting thread, very different as what i'm working on though.
And yes if you could move my thread to the correct forum that would be great.)

Djarlo · 5 Mar 2011, 01:49

Anyone has any suggestions?