[Plugin] Selection Toys

alpro

thomthom, first off I'd like to say thanks for all your great plugins. However I'm having some problems with selections toys, I'm hoping it's just that I'm doing something wrong. I have some Xfrog trees and plants in 3ds Max format, and as you know faces are only textured on one side. I open them in Max and from there I can import directly into Thea, no problem. However I also have an older version of Vray, so I export as obj. out of Max and import into SU. I was hoping to select all the front faces and then use your UVtool kit to transfere frontface material to backface. The obj. comes into SU as a group, I open the group, select all, then from your toolbar select front faces, nothing. So I start playing around, select edges, boom only edges are picked, select faces and boom, only faces are selected. So it seemed to be working so I thought that being an Xfrog model your plugin might just need some time to pick all the front faces so I ran some errands and come back six hours later and nothing. So then I thought maybe there's a problem, tried again with the ruby console open, no error messages, nothing. Then I thought maybe a plugin conflict, so I installed Selection Toys in SU8 where the only other plugin I have installed right now is SU2Thea. I got the same results. I have tried every combination of select faces, select front faces, deselect back faces and I just can't get only front or back faces selected. This is on Vista, IE7, both SU7.1 and SU8. I've tried Selection Toys 2.2.1 and the previous version, all the same results. I can post a screen cast later today if it helps. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks again.

Mike

thomthom

Yes, a screencast would be useful.

Note, you talked selecting frontfaces, backfaces - you can't select a given side of a face. you can only select a face. Maybe this is related to your issue?

alpro

ok thomthom, it was user confusion then but I thought the front default material and back default material icons in your toolbar would allow me to select only the front or back face.

Mike

Mra

Can't seem to turn off the "Edge loop" button, it is stuck!?

thomthom

@unknownuser said:

Can't seem to turn off the "Edge loop" button, it is stuck!?

It's a tool, the button stays down for as long as you use the tool. Activate another tool and the button goes back to its original state.

Gaieus

TT, please, find a file attached.

This is a church I am working on. there is a layer for all the Vaults. there are (now for better understanding) three kinds of components on this layer:

the half domes at the end - these are single components on the Vaults layer.
the vaulting of the nave - they are nested components where
the parent component is on the Vaults layer but
the child partites (the four quadrants) are on layer 0* finally the aisle vaulting (also nested)
where both parent and child are on the vaults layer
Now go to Select > All on selected layers and see what happens when you want to move the whole selection (in my case that would be along the z axis > up, so watch fro the side). It sems that the aisle vaults are being moved twice as high (I guess the reason is that both the parent and child components are being moved at the same pace).

(Also, as the vaults are correctly flipped, try to move them around horizontally to see a very funny menuette they are performing)

Church_selection_toys.skp

thomthom

@gaieus said:

Now go to Select > All on selected layers and see what happens when you want to move the whole selection (in my case that would be along the z axis > up, so watch fro the side). It sems that the aisle vaults are being moved twice as high (I guess the reason is that both the parent and child components are being moved at the same pace).

I'd expect so. I don't think SU tools are designed to deal with selections that goes across contexts. It probably applies the transformation to all entities regardless.
Not much I can do about that. I think that the SU developers never intended this type of selections - and that Selection Toys is a bit naughty in allowing it.

@gaieus said:

(Also, as the vaults are correctly flipped, try to move them around horizontally to see a very funny menuette they are performing)

I have some models where face-me components on Sang has gone all weird and makes Sang break-dance around.

Gaieus

OK, if this is how it is then I leave it. I could get around in other ways (elect active does what I needed for instance) so not a biggie.

thomthom

Even funnier - try rotating.

What a beautiful ballet!

thomthom

Make an even deeper nested model and you can make a funky movie "exploding" the model to display it's structure - only to return to normal after a full rotation.

Gaieus

I'll play around!

Yes, rotting is something you could only see in 18th century Paris or Vienna!

Mra

@thomthom said:

@unknownuser said:

Can't seem to turn off the "Edge loop" button, it is stuck!?

It's a tool, the button stays down for as long as you use the tool. Activate another tool and the button goes back to its original state.

Sorry for the late respsonse, but thanks for the reply!

JPMays

I'm really having trouble figuring out to use this tool, but please forgive my ineptitude. I first downloaded and installed this in order to select all faces that are at a certain orientation (as Thom lists in his initial post). However, I can't figure out how to actually do that. Additionally, even attempting to use the tool that selects all faces doesn't appear to work. what am I doing wrong/how do i select faces with a particular orientation?

thomthom

@jpmays said:

I'm really having trouble figuring out to use this tool, but please forgive my ineptitude. I first downloaded and installed this in order to select all faces that are at a certain orientation (as Thom lists in his initial post). However, I can't figure out how to actually do that

Select a face
Right-click the face
Select > Coplanar Faces

@jpmays said:

Additionally, even attempting to use the tool that selects all faces doesn't appear to work.

There is no function to select all faces. There is a function that filters out the current selection to include only the selected faces.

JPMays

That's not exactly what I meant. See this thread http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=79&t=35393 that resolved the issue.

TheButtersShow

Thanks! A Great Plugin.

For my purposes most useful for digging through nested Components and groups and selecting only the particular entities I need without the time consuming process of having to explode or enter the context of every single one.

66searcher

@ thomthom:
thanks for your great plugins.recently I've installed Sketchup 8 pro .and i have some kinds of problem with using selection toys ! many tools in toolbar are not loaded?!
would u help!?

thomthom

Do you get any error messages?

66searcher

i found it out !
i haven't checked tools in UI !
thank u anyway

Al Hart

I have a suggestion for carrying over the name of the group as the name of the component definition as well:

The last three lines in this snippet:

		# Iterate through the rest of the copies
		protodef = proto.definition
		if (group_name != "")
			protodef.name = group_name
		end#if

It seems to work pretty well, and SketchUp adds #'s as needed to make the name unique.