Does this plugin exist?

mikenon

Hi,
I am a medium level sketchup user (not newbie, but not as expert as people on this forum). Anytime I am doing something extremely tedious and mindless, I think "there must be a plugin for that." So I am in a situation like that, but cant find the right plugin. I would be greatful for anyone's advice. Even partial solutions which get me half of the way there.

Basically, I am looking for a more complicated version of memory-copy or path-copy, where I can take values from tables (or from drawn curves?) for various transformations.

For instance, a simply array of objects might be created by reading from a table for x positions:
x-offset: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8

A more complicated array might allow the spacing to be selected from a non-linear function, like exponential:
x-offset: 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128

Now, I might want to do two transformations simultaneously on different functions. Here x-offset is exponential, but rotation is linear:
x-offset: 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128
rotation-degrees: 10,20,30,40,50,60,70,80

I have been doing this manually for a set of designs, but I am now doing 100s of elements, with various linear and non-linear transformations on a range of variables (rotation, spacing, scaling), that are not in-sync with each other (they dont share the same period, so it never repeats). Its taking hours!!!

I can imagine it might be possible to take some of these values from drawn curves instead of tables.

Any ideas?

Mike

pilou

Without a little image i don't understand very well but
Have you seen Grow 2 by Tig?

Seems that is exactly that you want to make!

mikenon

@unknownuser said:

Without a little image i don't understand very well but
Have you seen Grow 2 by Tig?

Seems that is exactly that you want to make!

Ok, thats a great start. Ive been hacking through the Grow2 code today and have enough to do what I want. To start, I have already added periodic functions (sin/sawtooth) since grow only has continuously growing functions.

I would like to also add manually inputted arrays of numbers so that you can output the results of a custom function from another program. Perhaps someone might then be able to help modify it to work based on a visual curve instead of a table...I will upload results to the Grow2 thread when Im done.

thanks!
Mike

mikenon

Ok, I made the plugin. Thanks for your help TIG! I used a bunch of your code from Grow2. This new plugin has all the functionality of Grow2, plus allows you to enter lists of values or freeform expressions:

Parametric Copy:
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?p=361858#p361858

If anyone has a chance to try this out, let me know what you think

pilou

Bravo for the efforts!