SU 9 Wishlist

watkins

Dear Joel,

Yes, I know about the VCB box displaying the number of segments, and I should check it more often than I do, but I often forget. What I am suggesting is a 'prompt' to remind you to change (or not) the number of segments.

Kind regards,
Bob

Crankston Shnord

BumpMaps, I definately want a good bumpmapping tool.

brodie

@jgb said:

It Does this now.
When you click on the circle or arc tools, the current number of segments are shown in the VCB (Measurements box). Usually 24 for the circle and 12 for the arc.
Start your circle/arc and that is the segments you draw in, until you select the tool next.

Cool, didn't know that. It would be nice if when you clicked on an already created circle, though, the segments would still pop up in the VCB. Currently it displays nothing there. That's about the only thing I use the entity info bar for so it'd be nice to totally do away with that.

-Brodie

ken

What I would want is more menu options, i.e. Edit#1, Edit#2, Edit #3,Draw#1, Draw#2, Draw#3, Tool#1, Tools#2, Tools#3, and Plugin#1, Plugin#2, Plugins#3. And also the possibly to rename each. So if you had no plugins in Edit#1, it wouldn't show. However, if you wanted, you could name Edit#1 to Cleanup Tools, and so on. This way, my plugin menu option would not be required to have all the plugins which it now has and I could sort the plugins by actions or functions.

Ken

jgb

@unknownuser said:

It would be nice if when you clicked on an already created circle, though, the segments would still pop up in the VCB. Currently it displays nothing there. That's about the only thing I use the entity info bar for so it'd be nice to totally do away with that.
-Brodie

If you keep the Entity Info box open all the time, and you select an arc or circle, it will tell you how many segments there are, and the Radius (for the circle) or arc length.

If the circle has not been exploded (fully intact) you can change the number of segments and/or the radius by changing the non-grayed out values in the Entity Info box. For non-intact circles/arcs, there are some elements that can be changed that way, but with varying results.

brodie

@jgb said:

@unknownuser said:

It would be nice if when you clicked on an already created circle, though, the segments would still pop up in the VCB. Currently it displays nothing there. That's about the only thing I use the entity info bar for so it'd be nice to totally do away with that.
-Brodie

If you keep the Entity Info box open all the time, and you select an arc or circle, it will tell you how many segments there are, and the Radius (for the circle) or arc length.

If the circle has not been exploded (fully intact) you can change the number of segments and/or the radius by changing the non-grayed out values in the Entity Info box. For non-intact circles/arcs, there are some elements that can be changed that way, but with varying results.

right right, and it's not a huge box or anything. currently i just always keep it minimized all the time and only 'open' it on the occasion that I need to change the # of segments. My point is simply that this is literally the only thing I use it for, so replacing that one function and moving it to the VCB would be a nice little space saver for my screen.

-Brodie

genma saotome

Might as well toss my two cents in... some useful, basic changes that are long overdue:

Select front faces that have no material.
Put Sketchup.break_edges= true | false into preferences. I almost always have it set to false and typing that into the ruby window each and every time I start is a PITA.
When rotating a material, please, please, let me type the numeric value. You do it with the rotate tool... why not here as well?
Give us the means to color the endpoint pixels differently from the line itself. They can be very hard to see in many circumstances.
Let me define a shortcut for texture rotation.

Gaieus

@genma saotome said:

When rotating a material, please, please, let me type the numeric value. You do it with the rotate tool... why not here as well?

+11

TIG

I agree with you Dave...
BUT currently you can select all active faces that don't have a material with this one liner pasted into the Ruby Console or made into a short script...

m=Sketchup.active_model;s=m.selection;s.clear;m.active_entities.each{|e|s.add(e)if e.class==Sketchup;;Face and not e.material}

To set 'break_edges' false UNLESS you set it true [i.e. reverse the usual default] add a script to the Plugins folder called say #break_edges.rb and into it add this one short line of code Sketchup.break_edges=false - now when Sketchup starts it has always 'break_edges' set to 'false'...

I agree that the texture rotation should be editable by typing in an angle. It'd make a good addition to thomthom's UVtools - select the face with the texture, run the tool and pick center for rotation [defaults to 1st vertex], 'axle' is set as face.normal, and them either manually move cursor to see texture rotate dynamically, or type an angle in the VCB to rotate it by etc...

The edge ends coloring could be useful in some circumstances.

Being able to shortcut beyond the basic Texture command would be very good too...

mitcorb

I don't care how naive this seems, but more pushpins for placing photos as texture.

Gaieus

Well, that's been raised, too. This way we could manipulate UV mapping much more flexibly.

jgb

@gaieus said:

Well, that's been raised, too. This way we could manipulate UV mapping much more flexibly.

Could you please explain what UV mapping is all about?

I think it has to do with photorealistic rendering but I really do not know.

TIG

@jgb said:

@gaieus said:

Well, that's been raised, too. This way we could manipulate UV mapping much more flexibly.

Could you please explain what UV mapping is all about?

I think it has to do with photorealistic rendering but I really do not know.

It's what happens when you adjust a texture using the right-click texture tool...
It about locating, orienting, rotating, scaling, skewing a texture's image so it's applied to a face as you'd like.
For example apply a texture to a sphere and it'll probably look wrong, to make it 'map' better onto the surface's facets you adjust some of the faces' textures UVs [i.e. put simply XYZ >> UVQ, the XYZ are relating to the geometry while UVQ relate to the how the texture is applied to the face with UV corresponding to XY values etc...

jgb

This has been asked before, but my current project needs it in spades.

I'm drawing fairings for my big freighter. That entails drawing a lot of lines that run very close, or co-linear to existing structural lines to get a smooth transition. That will setup my perimeter and control curves that Curviloft will need to make the mesh.

But I need to identify the fairing lines vrs. structural lines in order to refine the curves. The fairing lines are generated in a group so separation is not the problem.

IF I could simply draw lines in colour, or thick/thin that would make it a lot easier to see which line belongs to which part of the structure or fairing. I would convert them to standard line afterwards.

jgb

Thanks Tig; You said "It about locating, orienting, rotating, scaling, skewing a texture's image so it's applied to a face as you'd like."

I have exactly that problem applying a Bamboo texture to a tube for my Silver Dart project. I got it right for a vertical stick (a component), but when I rotate a copy or stretch a copy, it screws up royally.

The Bamboo texture originated from a .JPG photo of a section of bamboo.
Playing with materials is not an SU area that I have any experience with.

thomthom

@jgb said:

IF I could simply [b]draw lines in colour,

You can do that. Set the Edge Style to Color by Material, and just paint the colours you want for your edges.

jgb

@thomthom said:

@jgb said:

IF I could simply [b]draw lines in colour,

You can do that. Set the Edge Style to Color by Material, and just paint the colours you want for your edges.

DOHHH

And I even have the "Edge Styles" toolbar visible that has that icon.

Thanks

thomthom

Note that it's a slower edge style than just all one colour, so you might feel an performance hit on larger models.
But it's a mode I sue a lot when modelling from AutoCAD siteplans. Either colour each edge or simply just Color By Layer.

jgb

Good point, but at this time I'm just using the edge colour (Red Green and blue) to keep track of lines that need to be edited, vrs. OK lines, so the model will always revert to black lines.

TIG

Following on from the Texture-Rotation by typed in angle I wrote a quick tool to do it...
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?p=329765#p329765