[Plugin] Blackout

JClements

ThomThom:

I think this might have been discussed a year or two ago.

I make masks for postprocessing by turning all my layer colors to black and turn on Color By Layer in the Layer Manager. This eliminates messing with the material colors directly. I hardly ever organize my layers via a color scheme so this method is relatively fast to do and doesn't screw up the model. Also, SU shadows are exported with their greyscale value which can be interpreted in post processing as semi-transparent.

I often create a style for Color by Layer in my model and assign it Scene named "MASK" which only remembers style parameters. I can then use this scene to on toggle Color by Layer for any of the other scenes.

My workflow would be to click on any Camera view or Scene and select the "MASK" Scene, and export the current view as your mask for post processing.

Now IF Ruby can remember and store a model's existing Layer Colors and later restore them, then a script to temporarily change the model's layer colors to black, turn on Color by Layer, queue the File > Export > 2D Graphic dialog and then restore the layer colors after printing, might be pretty quick and handy.

thomthom

Interesting.
I made this script very very quickly. I might revise it and implement some more stuff suggested. Appears that there was more use for this than I thought. And there's some good ideas here.

MALAISE

THanks Thomthom

Back to the forum after a while and discovering new rubies

MALAISE

me3mar

can you please show some pics on how to use, and what for ?
that would be great
thanks in advance

sepo

Would it be possible to include transparency of .png . Give you an example. If you for instance have a .png tree in front of the material than tree should go black instead of rectangle. It would make life much easieer if possible.
Thanks

thomthom

Nope. Can't read transparency info. If I had access to the V-Ray maps I could have replaced the texture with the alpha texture - but I don't have access to that either.

sepo

Thanks for the reply.

xiombarg

This is actually another really good plugin for character and product design and a standard feature of high end modelling programs. Animation modelling programs implement this feature to help the designer get a better idea of a characters posture and demeanor which subtly reflects their personality. Product designers also use it for similar purposes.

Probably is a good idea to do a quick save before using it though, just in case.

onzki

Hi I know it's an old thread. Is there a way to customize the color, instead of black maybe something else, like red or any RBG code? Thanks!

Didier Bur

Hi onzki,

Go to your 'Plugins' folder and open 'blackout.rb' in a pure text editor (Notepad++ for instance).

Search for lines like this one:

material.color = 'Black'

Replace 'Black' with the color you want, like 'red', 'green', 'blue' and so on.

Lines to be modified are: 42, 69,91, if i'm not mistaken.

The names of available colors can be found on this page:
https://ruby.sketchup.com/Sketchup/Color.html

To customize the color with RGB values will be a little longer to explain
Save the file blackout.rb, quit SketchUp and restart.

Regards,

Didier Bur

Hi, me again,

Here is an enhanced version with which you can select your color in a list.
Menu can still be found in the 'Extensions' menu but I've put the 3 options in a sub-menu to spare your menu space
Hope Thomthom won't mind if I modified his script.

Regards,

blackout.rb

onzki

@didier bur said:

Hi, me again,

Here is an enhanced version with which you can select your color in a list.

Regards,

Amazing! Big Thanks!