[Plugin] PLY Importer

Jim

Here's a reasonably-size example:

403 Forbidden

(www.cs.virginia.edu)

Moo.

notareal

Nice. Expecting to see some Chinese gardens with high poly dragons?

driven

import works,

and scrubs up, OK

but, how do you skin a cow on a Mac?

Hi,
this could be very handy, but the skinning is not working on mac? is it possible to tweak the code?

john

Jim

I don't understand SketchUp sometimes - my cow looked fine and was skinned on import. I did not need to do any cleanup.

driven

how do I revert to standard import to see if it bring faces?

john

thomthom

maybe the data is read somewhat differently on Mac..?

Jim

Line endings? Seems doubtful, but maybe.. will check.

thomthom

that - or interpretation of commas/periods depending on locale settings...
stabbing in the dark here

Jim

After reading the spec again, I'm surprised my "naive" implementation from 2006 works at all. I probably had the same thought then as I am having right now - it's hardly worth the effort for such an obscure file format. Good programming exercise, though.

driven

Hi again,

I certainly don't NEED it enough to warrant any effort, importing via MeshLab as either odj, dae or dxf is very painless on a mac, for the odd occasion that I'd want to.

the cow, which I copy pasted into a text file, re-named cow.ply is the only .ply I've had any success importing to SU and it won't open in MeshLad (I get a missing header message)

I'm more in need of 'skink-wrapping' of complex engineering geometry which I can't seem to find for Mac SU usage.

john

Jim

I re-wrote this so it should work with most ascii .ply files that have vertex and face elements. See first post for download.

driven

Hi Jim, thanks

I'll try it out later on and see if there's still a Mac issue, cheers

BTW have you ever had a play with Apanta Studio, the PC editor [that's now ported to Mac?]

john

driven

took longer to upload the Jpeg then to load into SU so that's very good, but I now have a request because I may have a use... can it import into a component, to save SU re-calculating all the faces?
came in so fast

Jim

If there is any geometry in the model (i.e. the model is not empty,) then the import is made in a Group. Will that work?

Glad to see it working.

driven

yep, there some very good .ply figures out there for just dropping in for a render and casting off... and group scale and move well enough.

cheers
jhon

thomthom

I've been looking around at the various ruby based importers for SketchUp and I see that no one uses the Importer class. If this class is used the importer can be found in the native import list which would be very nice.
http://code.google.com/apis/sketchup/docs/ourdoc/importer.html

Jim

Yeah, I used it on a ascii/binary .stl importer I wrote - works well.

charly2008

Hi Jim,

Thank you very much. It works very well.

Charly

Jim

@charly2008 said:

Thank you very much. It works very well.

Thanks, I am as surprised as you.

tomws

<Newbie alert>
I'm trying to understand how to use this plugin (ultimately want to use it to import a terrain mesh). I've 'installed' the plugin and, to try it out, I copied the simple cube shown in http://paulbourke.net/dataformats/ply/ into a file called 'simple_cube.ply' as follows:
ply
format ascii 1.0 { ascii/binary, format version number }
comment made by Greg Turk { comments keyword specified, like all lines }
comment this file is a cube
element vertex 8 { define "vertex" element, 8 of them in file }
property float x { vertex contains float "x" coordinate }
property float y { y coordinate is also a vertex property }
property float z { z coordinate, too }
element face 6 { there are 6 "face" elements in the file }
property list uchar int vertex_index { "vertex_indices" is a list of ints }
end_header { delimits the end of the header }
0 0 0 { start of vertex list }
0 0 1
0 1 1
0 1 0
1 0 0
1 0 1
1 1 1
1 1 0
4 0 1 2 3 { start of face list }
4 7 6 5 4
4 0 4 5 1
4 1 5 6 2
4 2 6 7 3
4 3 7 4 0

I then open SketchupPro V8 and select this plugin from the plugin menu. I select the 'simple_cube.ply' file and get the following result on the Ruby Console:
Error: #<NoMethodError: undefined method times' for nil:NilClass> C:/Program Files (x86)/Google/Google SketchUp 8/Plugins/jf_ply_importer.rb:104:in parse_faces'
C:/Program Files (x86)/Google/Google SketchUp 8/Plugins/jf_ply_importer.rb:102:in each' C:/Program Files (x86)/Google/Google SketchUp 8/Plugins/jf_ply_importer.rb:102:in parse_faces'
C:/Program Files (x86)/Google/Google SketchUp 8/Plugins/jf_ply_importer.rb:51:in parse' C:/Program Files (x86)/Google/Google SketchUp 8/Plugins/jf_ply_importer.rb:208:in ply_import'
C:/Program Files (x86)/Google/Google SketchUp 8/Plugins/jf_ply_importer.rb:231
C:/Program Files (x86)/Google/Google SketchUp 8/Plugins/jf_ply_importer.rb:104:in `call'
C:/Program Files (x86)/Google/Google SketchUp 8/Plugins/jf_ply_importer.rb:104

Uh, what am I doing wrong?

And, if I get past this, what units should I set my vertices to (currently in feet, inches, fractional inches)?

Thanks in advance,
Tom