Plugin Idea
-
Hello Plugin Gurus,
I was wonderng if this exists or would be a good idea for a new plugin:
The ability to hover over a group, hold a short cut key and be able to select a face or edge inside a nested group.
This would save TONS of time clicking in and out of nested groups/components.
Any takers?
P.S. Thanks to all the scripters for your gracious plugins!!! They are much appreciated.
-
Hi,
There's no way of 'entering' group editing from a ruby script AFAIK... -
You CAN tunnel down using a 'pick_helper' to find everything below the cursor at the click and filter the array of objects returned to find a particular thing or kind of thing even if its inside a group. I have recently written a customized tool to swap parts inside a DC, by picking them from outside the DC. It works.
So you could have a tool parallel to the built-in 'Select' that does it...
However, what would you want to do with the selected face/edge inside the group. Unless you are in a group edit mode you can't Erase/Move/etc them, unless you also have parallel tools to do these actions too on nested objects as well...
Didier is right - you can't go 'into' a group edit mode through 'code' [but you can step 'out' of an edit though...] - you must do a manual edit to make the groups entities the active_entities, BEFORE running any tool on those entities... unless you write a complex set of tools editing the internals of a group. My DC click editor is straightforward as the definition of the picked object [another DC] has to be the required 'type' and is swapped with the definition of a similar one in the code. -
Wow, quite an explanation TIG, thank you.
I would find this operation most useful to texture or reverse faces inside a group/component.
I often get CAD files that have tons of nested groups and I need to texture them or reverse their faces. I thought this kind of tool would speed up the process.
BTW, what is a "pick_helper"? -
You don't really want to know!
...put very simplistically... part of a Tool's coding can spot when you click the mouse and a 'pick_helper' makes a list of what you might have picked below the cursor - there are various methods to pick just faces or edges, or 'everything' - then you need to sift through the list to find the kind of thing you want and decide if it's a match... e.g. you might click a face inside a component-instance, inside a component-instance, inside a component-instance - I my recent tool I look at the component instances and check if their definition has a certain attribute assigned to it - if so then I swap it for a similar [but different] definition...In your case... if you want to apply the front material to the back etc there are already tools to do that, mining down into the groups/instances... If you want to do it on a selection basis and apply different materials it gets unwieldy...
Can you outline the exact steps you might do manually so I can think if it already exists, or if it is easy to sort out otherwise....
For example my Fix Reversed Face Materials toolset 'mine' already... -
If you want to quickly reverse back faces "digging down" in nested elements, Tomasz already has a tool:
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=13380
Just activate it an "paint" through the faces. The only drawback is that it reverses curved surfaces facet by facet (as if display hidden geometry were on). -
Hmmm thanks guys. The reverse face tool looks promising.
It seems like the only way to dig through nested groups and paint individual faces is by clicking through them.I appreciate all the feedback!
-
@wolfy said:
Hmmm thanks guys. The reverse face tool looks promising.
It seems like the only way to dig through nested groups and paint individual faces is by clicking through them.I appreciate all the feedback!
You misunderstand...
Several of these tools WILL dig through nesting and fix ALL faces' materials front-v-back... -
@wolfy said:
Hmmm thanks guys. The reverse face tool looks promising.
It seems like the only way to dig through nested groups and paint individual faces is by clicking through them.I appreciate all the feedback!
There is such a tool - I was hopping for a long time somebody to make a plugin
@unknownuser said:
Place Material
Place Material uses an Explorer type tree to select materials and place them directly on faces without having to open components and groups for edit.
The tool “drills” into the model to determine which face, (or component or group), to change to place the material.
-
Since I almost always carefully position my materials as well, I really cannot imagine any plugin that would do it simplerfor me than to dig down 2 or three levels.
ThomThom's selection toys can also dig down to select things in nested groups/components and with that selection, you can also do some transformations (like moving/rotating for instance - which can be real fun sometimes) but to precisely do all this, I would rather try to access those entities in a more straightforward, native SU way.
-
Warning: Strange gremlins might appear in SketchUp if entities outside the current context is selected. User and developers beware.
Advertisement