[REQ] Automatic Export

[bubba_shubba]

Hi all,

I'm an intermediate sketchup user and have done my share of script programming over the years, whether for Revit, Autocad, ArchiCAD, Photoshop or whatever. The thought of learning Ruby is a bit daunting at this point as I'm an architect and have to focus on making buildings!

So here's my problem. I do buildings that often require sun studies, and the City where I live has standards for them - 2 days of the year (March 21, June 21) taken at hourly intervals from 9am to 6pm. I have written a set of scripts and actions for Photoshop that automates the process of layering my images from Sketchup to generate shadow boundaries... we often have to overlay a "built to the word of the by-law" shadow on top of our "proposed building" shadow and I have developed a technique+action to do this easily. However, exporting each image one by one, for each hour of the day, for 4 different layer states sure takes a long time. If I get in the groove, it takes half an hour to do all 80 images... but I have better things to do, as do others in my office And after looking into using the Animation technique to export, it doesn't look like it will work for me.

So what do I need out of the Ruby script? Export a Scene X times, on hourly intervals from a specified start point, into a directory with a naming scheme that indicates date, time, and layer setting (currently it's MMDD_0900_SCENE.jpg, MMDD_1000_SCENE.jpg, etc where SCENE would be the name of the scene tab). I'm hoping that there is a plugin out there that already does something like this, or that I can frankenstein one together out of a couple that already exist... but I'm really new to the world of SU plugins. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Or point me to a tutorial or two that have examples of how I would write the script for this? Or does anyone want to do it out of the kindness of their heart? hehe

Anyway, thanks for reading!

[glro]

the closest plugin to your search i have seen in this forum is http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=40569

i didn't try it

Hope it helps