Engraved sign maker, technique, or plugin

Dan Rathbun

Dave these signs are 3"x8", based on what is available on a couple of webpages that sell such things.

Well since the invention of the FlowJet making signs like this should be much less expensive than the old router engraved signs.

The flowjet would cut out the top layer in a fraction of the time that a router could engrave them.
Then the cut out layer is glued (or fastened with hardware,) to a backing layer.

sdmitch

After working on a plugin to satisfy this request, the three things that .add_3d_text needs most is

A text alignment that really means something as this video demonstrates.
[flash=640,480:1oeov0o2]http://www.youtube.com/v/UmZZfMXefiQ[/flash:1oeov0o2]
A parameter to locate the origin of the text rather than always being created
at the model ORIGIN.
A parameter to define the normal of the text rather than always [0,0,1].

Dan Rathbun

Well to mimic the native tool...

you first create an empty group (so you have a reference,)

Then you add the 3dtext to that group's entities (not the model's)...

... then you transform that group, translation, rotation, etc.

or.. set the selection set to only the textgroup, and call the MoveTool with Sketchup.send_action()

TIG

The 3d text alignment argument only works on 'multi-line' strings (adding "\n" in the string will do this for you) then the lines are arranged left/right/center; otherwise a single line is just that.

If you add the 3d text inside a group or component-definition instance then it's straight forward to find its bounds.center, to convert that to to the bottom face use
cpt=group.bounds.center; cpt.z=group.bounds.min.z
OR .max.z for the 'top'.
Or any other point on the bounds [left/right/center etc]...
Once you have this you can get the translation vector to the required insertion point and transform! the group to suit. If you want the group's axes to be say central you can transform all of the group.entities en mass by the translation transformation so they are centered at the origin and then do the translation to the required insertion point...

If you add the 3d text inside a group or component-definition instance then it's straightforward to transform-rotate it in 3d so that its 'normal' [blue/Z axis] faces any direction you desire...

So for the last two your custom 3d text tool spec can include all of the required options, plus an insertion point and a 'normal'.

The way I do this with 2dText or AreaTag is to make it a component instance and glue it to a face, so the normal is set from the face, the picked point sets the location...

sdmitch

Dan,TIG

Adding the 3d_text to a group is what I finally did and, as you suggest, I used the group.bounds.center and face.bounds.center to create the translation transformation. That worked great on horizontal faces. In order to get it to work on inclined or vertical faces, I had to convert the group to a component where I could use the face.bounds.center and the face.normal to define the transformation for adding the instance.

A funny thing about the multi-line text input. Adding the '\n' to the string worked in the web console but, when I entered the same text into the inputbox, it was made part of the text.

TIG

The \n must be inside "", because inside '' it is read literally.

sdmitch

@tig said:

The \n must be inside "", because inside '' it is read literally.

Well maybe it's me but I have used no quotes, single quotes, and double quotes along with .to_s and without when assigning the string to a variable and the results is always the same. Everything in the inputbox is treated as a single text string.

TIG

You MUST use text.gsub!(/\\n/,"\n") to convert any '\n' in a string that has been passed from a dialog to include a true 'newline' in the string that you subsequently pass to 3d_text... perhaps this is the issue.

sdmitch

TIG, Thanks for the tip. That works! The gsub function remains a mystery to me.

Dan Rathbun

@sdmitch said:

The gsub function remains a mystery to me.

The "sub" stands for 'substitute' and there is a sub() method also (but it only makes one substitution.)

Not sure what the "g" stands for.. 'global' perhaps ?? (it makes makes as many substitutions as it can.)

http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-1.8.6/String.html#method-i-gsub

snoyes

Back to the original question of how to engrave text: if you have the Pro version, the solid tools make combining the 3D Text component and the rest of the model easy.

For the rest of us, a few lines of Ruby make it easier to select all those faces and fill in the missing holes. See http://www.instructables.com/id/Engrave-3D-Text-With-Sketchup/