[Plugin] Edge Tools

gavvy

Tomtom ,can i have your msn-account-name??

pilou

hm... no...
this one is a thinker...

Because after this will easy to have a uniform object well oriented!

thomthom

@unknownuser said:

hm... no...
this one is a thinker...

Because after this will easy to have a uniform object well oriented!

If the purpose is to orient all faces, then right click a face and choose Orient Faces.

pilou

No, it's not so simple
Try with the object linked above!
You must select by hand all different aeras and make different Reverse before Orient
Easy with this object but for a more complex, it's a mess!

thomthom

Ah, yea, I see now that there are a couple of problem areas. The problem here is knowing programmatically what is "outside".

pilou

"Outside" is not given by face's sign of a normal?

arjunmax09

Awesome!!! Awesome!!!Awesome!!!Awesome!!!Awesome!!! Thomthom you rock...that's why a rocking cake for you btw..do you listen to u2??

mitcorb

Sketchup would have to decide what is outside, what is inside. What if it would have something to do with faces facing camera? Or, if the model is a closed volume somehow Sketchup would check for this and assumes all outside faces should be white, all inside faces should be grey. But what would it decide on an almost closed volume?

TIG

That is why with some of my tools - like EEbyRails - it makes the mesh and asks if you want to reverse the faces - it tries to double-guess which is inside and which is out, BUT only you know which way round you'd like it...

thomthom

Problem arise when you have meshes with internal faces.

TIG

If an edge has more than two faces it is impossible to have all of those faces oriented the same way.
A simple fact of geometry - therefore trying to orient meshes with 'internal' faces is futile...

mitcorb

This must be due to Sketchup being a surface modeler?.
I'm not sure what Blender is classified as, but it has ways to deal with face orientation, internals and duplicates. I wonder if some analogous form of these concepts could still be applied to Sketchup?-- that is, short of exporting to Blender and back.

thomthom

Update 1.1.1
Important bug fix in my Ramer-Douglas-Peucker implementation of the curve simplification.

Ben Ritter

Thom thom, thank you for the great plugin. I don't seem to understand how to get the colinear function. I see the rest but not this one.

Ben

notareal

Nice!

thomthom

Sorry about replacing the Divide Face video is a poorer quality YouTube video, but I ran out of bandwidth on Screencast and I did not have the original video.

pilger

Hey thom!

I wonder if the simplify curve bit work with closed curves or even surfaces. I find myself in a position in which i imported geometry from a DWG and it left me with some insanely segmented edges. I'm trying to find a method to simplify this thing which complies with the Human Rights.

I've uploaded a small sample to make it clearer.

Thanks in advance.
EDIT:
Found a neat SimplifyCountours.rb script right on the SketchUp repository (http://sketchup.google.com/download/rubyscripts.html). Silly me.

I figured i should post it here in order to help whoever has a similar issue, since it's somehow related to the plugin subject.

I'll be keeping your plugin though, thom. It's pure juice. Keep it up!

Segments from imported geometry

thomthom

I realised last week that it did not work for closed curves. But this I should be able to make work.

However, it will not work with faces attached.

pilger

That wouldn't be much of a problem. There's a pretty good Make Face plugin around (i don't remember who wrote it, though).

I'm having some difficulties in using that Simplify thingy i've found as it uses angles to do the dirty job and not the neat Rammer-Douglas_Peucker algorhithm. $:\$

thomthom

Yea - it's why I was looking for a different algorithm as I found that Simplify didn't preserve the overall shape as well.

From your screenshot it looks as though you have a lot of criss-crossing curves. That leads to problems with any curve simplification algorithms.

In my DP implementation I pre-process the selection to locate curve segments. A curve segment is only valid if it doesn't have faces connected or forks. Anything that doesn't fit the requirements is silently ignored.