[Plugin] STL Importer/Exporter

DIEGO-RODRIGUEZ · 17 Dec 2009, 18:47

thank you very much for sharing.
Could make the menu visible, in order to personalize it.
the plugins *.rbs , and menu of plugins *.rb

blixten · 22 Feb 2011, 22:34

It would be nice if it was possible to select STL-format (ASCII or binary).
Not only will binary format be a smaller file. But wouldn't it also have more accurate values?
Since you avoid translating the values to ASCII when exporting, and back to float when importing.

ElijahPost · 14 Oct 2011, 16:06

Totally doesn't work for me. I could very well be doing it wrong, but when I open SU 8 It's as if nothing ever happened. Am I missing something?

Didier Bur · 15 Oct 2011, 07:40

Hi,

@unknownuser said:

It's as if nothing ever happened

What do you mean ? No menu ? Plugin does nothing when called ? No STL exported ?
Please describe your problem more precisely so I can help

Phemto · 29 Nov 2011, 12:19

It looks like ElijahPost went dark. Maybe he found the solution himself and was too embarrassed to say just how obvious it was. I, on the other hand, have no shame. I've installed the files from the zip file in the plugin directory of sketchup 8. When I open the program, there's just one problem. I can't find the "plugins" menu item.

tomasz · 19 Jan 2012, 20:13

Thank you Didier for the exporter! If a price of a printed model won't stop me from printing, I will post a picture of it.

hackaddict · 5 Oct 2012, 23:17

I can't get this to work. I have sketchup 8 and am running mountain lion (osx). I drop the rbs into the application's plugins folder (right click on sketchup and select "show package contents" - then I navigate to the plugins folder). When I relaunch sketchup there is no plugins menu available and when I go to preferences>extensions nothing new shows up. Thoughts?

TIG · 6 Oct 2012, 09:23

Because the tools are auto-loaded from a RBS file it will load after all of the RB files in the Plugins folder, therefore the tool's two Plugins menu items will appear at the end of the list.
So did you scroll to the very bottom of the menu after the restart of SketchUp?

If so and it's still not there after a restart then you have almost certainly mis-installed the RBS file.
On a MAC the correct location is the 'plugins' folder in the Macintosh HD/Library... NOT the similar folder in the ' User' path...
Typically it should be something like Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 8/SketchUp/plugins/
It should never have ' User' in its path.
However, if you have elected to install SketchUp in a non-standard manner then your detective work will be harder...

Try a copy+paste +<enter> on these two lines into the SketchUp Ruby Console: they will return the full path to the installed 'plugins' folder - as a double check the second one finds a pre-installed script that should be in that folder too...
Sketchup.find_support_file('plugins')
and then
Sketchup.find_support_file('ocean_extension.rb', 'plugins')

Treble check that your files have been put into the correct folder and restart SketchUp and then look at the end of the Plugins menu...

Report back

danrochman · 12 Feb 2013, 18:00

Just wanted to add a quick reply for two reasons:

THANK YOU FOR CREATING AND SHARING THIS!!
I just installed the English version on Windows 8 (64-bit), with Trimble SketchUp 8. I haven't tried exporting yet, but installation was effortless, and I've tested the STL import function - no issues so far. If anyone's wondering, the default plugins path (for me) was "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Google SketchUp 8\Plugins". [Yes, it's Trimble's app now, but the path is still Google's. ] So for any who may be wondering, this plugin seems to be working fine with the latest versions of Windows & SketchUp. Thanks again, Didier Bur!

thomthom · 12 Feb 2013, 22:20

FYI, there is a newer STL import/export project, open sourced by the SketchUp team over at: https://github.com/SketchUp/sketchup-stl