Cricket for SketchUp; could this be true?

jolran

I talked to some guys at Basecamp about something like this. There is interest. Which this thread also displays. So it's a good potential for a plugin project

Well it already is a plugin project for me. Got some nice interaction with nodes and bezier curves.
But I don't feel like putting a lot of work into this if someone else or even a company like it looked in this case has a similar project almost in hand.

It's no fun putting a lot of work into something and then someone else beat you to it. But I guess thats the rule of the game..

So the guys at bascamp already started something or ?

BTW. Pilou, I doubt you would benifit from a plugin like this anyway clinging on to Ie6 and SU6 NO? This would require at least IE9.

thomthom

@jolran said:

So the guys at bascamp already started something or ?

Just idea talk. Someone showcased grasshopper for Rhino and some of up talked whether if it would be possible for SketchUp. I know of no-one who's working on something like this.
I'd say go for it. Release an early simple version and grow it over time.

@jolran said:

BTW. Pilou, I doubt you would benifit from a plugin like this anyway clinging on to Ie6 and SU6 NO? This would require at least IE9.

jolran

Thanks Thomthom, sounds good enough.

I'll give it a wack since I already got something going

Pixero

If it sounds to good to be true...it usually is.

Jolran, I'd be very interested in seeing what you've done.

dmatho

My Reply to Nathan Miller (who posted the announcement) was:
a) too bad it was a prank, but created a storm
b) thanked for making all of us aware there's a real need and a possibility something like this may become true
c) hope we can count on you (him) further...

Cheers,

. Diego .

jolran

@unknownuser said:

You're correct, the "concept" is far from being new... See here: "Visual Algorithmic Design for Design Applications (A Rant]"

Cheers,

. Diego .

That's quite some old stuff but still very impressive list.
Paracloud looks cool. Still developped?
I think the only possibility is using webdialog, since SDK is no longer supported, or maintained ?

@unknownuser said:

Jolran, I'd be very interested in seeing what you've done.

Yeah, Ok. Since youre a fellow countryman I toss in some screeners. I'll probably regret showing stuff already, but I like feedback good or bad.(preferable good).

I'm still testing out stuff. Solving each problem and decide if it's worth to continue.
The hard part will be solving communication between the nodes and what/how/when to send to SU. Cause it has to happend quickly.

One idea is to have visual feedback all the time. Sort of design friendly. I don't think it is any point in letting the user connect X numbers of nodes and then hit a submitbutton.
Don't need a node interface for that.

Anyway heres a screentest. Nothing much really just some Jquery draggables and a plugin for making connections(still learning about that one). Doesent do anything with Su yet. The dialog is Jquery dialogclass that is created dynamically when doubleclicking node.

Don't pay to much attention to the styling, I will distance me from Grasshopper quite a bit further on. Also the things they do in grasshopper is quite amazing and some of them would kill Sketchup.. So Start easy, yeah?

pilou

Hope reborn!

DavidBoulder

Just posted this morning
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=51586

This is not what typical SketchUp user wants unless they are doing energy modeling but thought I would share. We are doing our parametric analysis outside of SketchUp using an OSM file (OpenStudio Model) as a baseline, and then the OSM can be loaded into the OpenStudio SketchUp Plugin. The ruby based measures that form the basis for design alternatives in PAT (Parametric Analysis Tool) can also be loaded into the OpenStudio SketchUp plugin and used to manipulate the currently loaded OpenStudio model. These can be geometric manipulations or can relate to less visible changes such as the type of activity or equipment in specific spaces.

Measure Library

Measure Arguments

Design Alternatives

thomthom

@jolran said:

I'm still testing out stuff. Solving each problem and decide if it's worth to continue.
The hard part will be solving communication between the nodes and what/how/when to send to SU. Cause it has to happend quickly.

One idea is to have visual feedback all the time. Sort of design friendly. I don't think it is any point in letting the user connect X numbers of nodes and then hit a submitbutton.
Don't need a node interface for that.

Looking mighty interesting and promising!

One option for fast visual feedback is to draw the geometry to the viewport using the view.draw method - and then generate the actual geometry as the user exits the tool.
I do that in my Catmull-clark subdivision experiment:

The generation of geometry is so much slower than the calculation of the subdivision that it was a good compromise - despite that the polygons got no soft shading or textures.

jolran

Spot on Thomthom! Thats the way to go.

Have made some experimenting outside this project with the viewclass. Very cool feature of the API I havent dug to deep into yet. Was thinking wireframe, but when I saw your flat shading gave me new hope. Very COOL!
Adding it to the A1 page TODO list.

BTW. Why do hardcore-programmers slam the keyboard so hard ?

thomthom

It's my cursed web-cam microphone. Picks up every ambient sound.
I need to use my headset with microphone - but I always forget to bring it home from the office.

Honesty, I'm very gentle!

Aaaanyway! Really looking forward to seeing how your project progresses.

thomthom

Btw, to further improve viewport drawing performance: cache! cache! cache!

Don't compute for every draw event, build a cache of instructions when the mesh changes instead.

I got a DrawCache class which has worked very well for me, it can be easily dropped into a project with little modifications because it accepts the same draw methods as the View class.

I wrote it for BezierSurface - but I'll untangle it and push it to TT_Lib so it's publicly accessible.
In my test model the draw event spent 0.100s because it was doing calculations each time. When I hooked up the DrawCache it spent only 0.005s.

thomthom

Here we go:
https://bitbucket.org/thomthom/tt-library-2/src/tip/TT_Lib2/draw_cache.rb?at=Version%202.8

Class: TT::DrawCache — Documentation by YARD 0.9.9

(www.thomthom.net)

Krisidious

Thomthom has a youtube channel? must subscribe...

jolran

Thanks! Very generous and useful

I'm deep into JS and webdialog stuff right now so I have to deal with that Ruby part later.
But again VERY useful.

This Node-based UI needs heavy planning. Compared to a normal UI wich more or less has determined number of options, here the user adds new options dynamically.
Obviously one has to consider that when working on communication between nodes..
It's functional programing I suppose..

My brother bought a Mac, so I will be able to test for that as well. So thats good.
Funny little thing, looked like a Playstation.

thomthom

I recommend using a framework such as jQuery - takes a lot of the pain away.

jolran

@unknownuser said:

I recommend using a framework such as jQuery - takes a lot of the pain away.

I am. It would be very difficult for me without Jquery. It's difficult as it is.
When things get going I guess one can refactor to plain js as much as possible, should one feel improved performance is necessary?

thomthom

@jolran said:

When things get going I guess one can refactor to plain js as much as possible, should one feel improved performance is necessary?

I wouldn't even consider it. Not unless you can prove by measurements that jQuery produces a bottleneck.

jolran

@unknownuser said:

I wouldn't even consider it. Not unless you can prove by measurements that jQuery produces a bottleneck.

Thanks that's sounds reassuring. I'd rather not change..

Spent a whole day trying to get the nodes communicating.
Finally made some progress. When dropping a nodecurve on an endpoint, and a event trigger and grab the value from the sourcenode, yesy! That's a very important aspect of the plugin.

It turned out that the connectionplugin do not create DOM elements or rather JQuery objects . So had to find some fancy Jquery selectors to convert the elements for "parler".

I notice I'm raping this topic quite a bit. Might create a new topic later on IF I get some good news or a testversion(that might delay) to play with. Sort of WIP maybe?

pilou

@unknownuser said:

Might create a new topic later on IF I get some good news or a testversion(that might delay) to play with. Sort of WIP maybe?

Sure!
Bon courage!