[REQ] Idea For A Ruby Script - Lineweights

treviesweets · 12 Oct 2008, 11:37

Hey Guys, I've been messing around with Sketchup and various programs (AutoCAD, Vectorworks, Illustrator & Photoshop mostly) over the last few days trying to come up with a good workflow where I could export a sketchup model and get good 2d views with lineweights from it without doing loads of redrawing.
To some extent like the process demonstrated in the Sketchup and AutoCAD video, on the 3dbasecamp site, where the guy exports his model as a dwg and xrefs it into AutoCAD and assigns lineweights to his layers.
The problem with that is well its kinda crap really, you have to dimension in CAD and sometimes you see funny lines inside walls and stuff like that.

So anyways here's my idea, why not come up with a ruby where you can do something like this;

Assign lineweights to specific layers or colours.
Make a group from your section cut.
Put the lines on their appropriate layers.
Then export the view as a pdf WITH the assigned lineweights.

After that if you had saved it as a scene you could even export a greyed out view of your model with shadows etc and combine them in photoshop.

I dono if I'm doing a very good job of explaining this :-S I'm sure someone must have thought of this already so there's probably a good reason why it couldn't be done or maybe its been done before who knows! If I was sure it could work I'd love to start learning to script myself but I'd have to have a pretty quick learning curve!