[REQ - Help] Division!
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I'm writing up a plug-in that for the most part won't help most people, it's a plug-in to divide and conquer my pieces (and set them to layers and scenes, but I won't get into that until the divide and conquer works).
Essentially, we make pipe. Pipe that is so big, so large, that frankly we need to cut it up into tiny little pieces that will fit on a truck and send it out.
So, imagine a jigsaw puzzle. I design the entire puzzle in sketchup and then I want to export each individual piece of that puzzle into layout. To do that, I need to make one scene where the entire puzzle is shown, one scene where only piece 1 is shown, one scene where only piece 2 is shown, etc, then export this into layout.
Oh, and since these are pipes, they're round, and that means that if I leave a single hidden line out of place, I'm screwed over, since those hidden lines have a nasty little habit of appearing on layer zero, which will pop up into layout on the sheets with only one piece on it with everything else hidden, since Layer0 is the default.
Now this should be easy enough to automate with a script...? I've never been much of an expert in ruby, but I know the basics of an Object Oriented Language, and have written many, many beautiful excel macros, for example.
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If you can do VBA macro programming, you've got the foundation for Ruby.
Warning: Ruby is a big language.
Solution: Google up Chris Pine's Ruby tutorial.
New topic. Don't Edit/Hide (or Shift+Erase).
One of the things I missed coming from DWPro to SU was the former's two-state hidden model. Hiding something moved it into a second model. A shortcut let you toggle back and forth between the "hidden" and "not hidden" models. It was nice.
Then I realized that SU had this capability, only better. Don't use Edit/Hide. Create a "hidden" layer and slide geometry into that layer. Or use multiple "hidden" layers. The gremlins that do untimely unhides don't mess with your layers.
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