[Plugin] PLY Importer

[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.