[Plugin] Lamella Roofs

timwarner

Dear Tim,

You and your colleagues are to be congratulated on your achievement. How long did it take start to finish, and did you have building experience before starting the project?

Kind regards,
Bob

Thx Bob,

This is actually a one-man show. I built a lamella roof (the one shown at the top of the thread) some years back, based on a crude, and actually wrong Excel model, but only worked out the exact geometry last year. Writing a plugin involved learning Ruby (OK, it shows!), and grappling with the SU documentation, which I have to say I find opaque in many ways. The plugin probably took about three months to work out.

I'm not a builder at all, but I've done some simple construction work, if dry-stack walls count.

pep75

Great plugin Tim!!

timwarner

I've corrected the plugin to reflect the very helpful community comments, and fix some minor errors in the way curved surfaces were being generated. Both the revised plugin and documentation are embedded in the original post to make them easier to find.
I'm still puzzling over a couple of issues. First is the odd failure of the intersect_with method in at least one circumstance. (Posted elsewhere http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=46714). This wipes out a couple of faces in a lamella, but is rare, and easy to fix manually. Second, the geometry is off by a small (< 1mm) amount in terms of the components not lining up exactly. It doesn't feel like a rounding error, so my calculations may be incorrect. Practically this is not significant.

Thx all, and TIG and Thomthom especially, for your advice.

Krisidious

Really appreicate the plugin... and even more so Tig and Thom for always checking all these plugins out for us and warning us before installing them.

timwarner

I've updated the plugin to allow the creation of a diagrid lamella roof, where the lamellas are co-planar, following brookefox's suggestion, and to add some error-checking and spinners on input. Updates are located with the original post.

Under some circumstances the upper surface of the lamella is not created properly, for reasons I still don't understand. The cutting instructions are correct, regardless.

Mra

Thanks Tim, hope I get to do a project with this kind of roof one day!

victor hugo

I dropped the lamella_roof.rb to the plugins folder and nothing happens, restarted SU and is not on the list?

Any one has the same issue.

I also like the big hangars made of concrete by the designer an italian eng-arch Pier Luigi Nervi.

Thanks.

Dave R

What did you expect to happen? Did "Lamella roof" show up in the Plugins menu?

Go back to the Plugins folder and make sure lamella_roof.rb is there with the correct extension and that you didn't put it in some other Plugins folder.

victor hugo

pasted in the C:\Program Files\Google\Google SketchUp 8\Plugins.

Dave R

Let's see if I can drag some useful information out of you so we can help you.

And after you close and reopen SketchUp does the plugin show in the Plugins menu? Do you really have XP as your profile indicates?

victor hugo

Not shown after reopen.

yes XP

Dave R

Post a screen shot of your Plugins folder showing the file installed. Make sure extensions are being shown.

And you did actually close SketchUp and reopen it? You didn't just minimize it?

victor hugo

Dave.

I had some extensions unloaded........ load them and restarted SU and is working now...

Thanks.

Dave R

There's no way in the world we could have helped you without knowing that.

I'm glad it's working now.

timwarner

Hi Dave R,

My understanding from this exchange is that the problem was related to Victor Hugo's plugin folder, but is there anything I should do to make this plugin more robust?

Dave R

Hi Tim,

No, your plugin is just fine. There's nothing you could do in your script to prevent a user from unticking boxes in the Extensions list under Preferences. V.H.'s problem wasn't specific to your script. It just happened yours is the one he was trying to use when he discovered he had a problem.

prousteilcalamaro

Hi Tim,

Your plugin seems very nice, however I've a problem in executing it.
After the two windows for the parameters (I leave them as default), the plugin stops working, no drawing is produced and the Ruby Console shows an error as follows:

@unknownuser said:

Error: #<NoMethodError: undefined method make_unique' for nil:NilClass> C:/Program Files (x86)/Google/Google SketchUp 8/Plugins/lamella_roof.rb:289:in lamella_roof'
C:/Program Files (x86)/Google/Google SketchUp 8/Plugins/lamella_roof.rb:1038

I'm using SU 8 and the new version of your plugin.

Is something wrong with my SU preferences? I've a lot of plugins loaded.
Let me know how to solve the problem (I'm not a programmer).

Thanks

Dave R

There's nothing wrong with Tim's plugin. It works just fine on SU 8. Considering that there's not much to installing it, I suspect you have another plugin that is causing the problem. There are some plugins that are known to cause other plugins to fail. SketchyPhysics is one.Matchbox_r1.1 is another. There are more. Perhaps you could post a screenshot of your Plugins directory and we'll be able to tell you which one it is.

TIG

Sounds like SketchyPhysics to me - that is known to mess with the base class/methods - like 'group.copy' which should return a reference to the 'new-group' but after the ill-advised reworking it returns 'nil'... so then when some legit code tries to do something to the copy
[like '.make_unique'] it fails because now it's 'nil' and not 'new_group'.
It could be relatively easy to fix this but the authors of this and some other 'rogue' scripts have either lost interest, or simply don't care about others and their legit tools, which expect the API to work as it ought...

prousteilcalamaro

Thank you very much!

I had SketchyPhysics in my Plugins folder. I removed that plugin (I don't need it for my actual project) and Lamella Roof works fine: it's a great plugin.