[Plugin] PLY Importer

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

Jim

Hi Tom,

From the paragraph just before the example you copied... "The comments in brackets are NOT part of the file, they are annotations to this example."

Remove them and the file will import.

tomws

Ooops. I feel like such a dweeb...

Thanks for being kind.

May I infer from the resulting cube, that 'units' are in inches and I need to convert all my dimensions to float inches?

Tom

Update: Worked like a champ! Thanks for your help!

Jim

@unknownuser said:

May I infer from the resulting cube, that 'units' are in inches and I need to convert all my dimensions to float inches?

Well, the .ply file format does not specify units at all, but SketchUp defaults to inches internally.

It's possible to add a units selection dialog for the importer, but the easiest thing to do is just scale the imported geometry to get the size you need.

Jim

Just a note - my .ply plugin has been adopted by SketchUp, and the code is being hosted on Github. It should soon be available in the Extensions Warehouse.

driven

that's great news jim

didn't you say " - it's hardly worth the effort for such an obscure file format. "

john

kaas

@jim said:

...It should soon be available in the Extensions Warehouse.

It didn't make the warehouse? I cant find it searching for 'ply'. Has it been renamed maybe? Trying the one on github now.

Jim

The code is probably not up to par for an official release to the EW. I wrote a lot of code years ago while I was out of work and had a lot of time. That was about 5 years ago. Since then, I have not had the time or energy to maintain the plugins and earn a living at the same time.

The code on Github is currently the best version to download.