Need a bit of guidance in solving a D C situation.

[Florescu]

Hi, friends!
I made a 3d model of a building for a fundraising event. So they expect 260 ppl to donate so they could buy the building.
Now they would love if the model will interact with the fundraising event dynamically, so that the main hall will be divided in 260 parts, each of them being able to contain the donor's name and when completed, to slightly change its color.(when
a person donates, her name will be filled in automatically (without overriding the box) and the box will become slightly highlited - involving less user actions like manually resizing or painting)
If we can make it actively interact with a table(maybe from microsoft excel) it would
be awesome.
I am not the best D C maker so I wanted to ask you what you think about this. Is it possible?
I've attached a picture for you with a summary of the issue.
Thank you for your time and I hope I learn fast so that I can help you too.

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[Jim]

Well, anything is possible. You would need a custom Ruby plugin to accomplish everything you describe.

Maybe this model can give you an idea using only SketchUp Pro, although it's a lot of work.

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donations.skp

[Florescu]

Thank you. It's a step forward.
The thing is that I don't know the donors' names until they donate.
And I might need to edit the 3d text after it's placed, or to scale it if one person has a bigger name than the box I intend to put it in.
I don't know how much work is involved. I only know that I am not the best coder around.
Still I can pay if somebody wants to help me with this.
We have one day left until the event. I hope there is still time.
Thank you. I'll be around if anyone wants.

[driven]

because you are projecting SU, you could have 'Ruby Console' open on a second monitor and create 3d Text from code...

you would only need 'pre-named' groups and a simple add_text method with two arguments, i.e. name of group and name of donor add_name('grp_18', 'Mrs Moneybags' ), then hit return...
do you have a second monitor?
john

[driven]

heres a link to one of TIG's throwaways that could be tweaked...http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=294253#p294253
john

[Florescu]

I have 2 24" monitors which are really wonderful things to have in multi-tasking and 3d modelling.
Thanks for your help. I'm trying to undestand the code lines now, and, since nothing is impossible, I will probably succeed

[driven]

you could just use TIG's TextTag ruby and start it from 'Ruby Console' using
TextTag.new instead of the menu item...
the advantage is you can do all the presets for font, color...
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=14125#p14125

if you want to try your own script here's a simple test + file...

def texter(grp, name)

Sketchup.active_model.active_entities.grep(Sketchup;;Group).each{|e| 
e.entities.add_3d_text(name,TextAlignRight,"Arial",false,false,10,5,0,true,1)  if e.name == grp }
nil  
end

to run texter('grp_5', "Mrs Moneybags")

you can change the font and add color etc...
your initial groups could just be a hidden baseline, to avoid having to transform the grp to a position...
johnopen this and run script from Ruby Console

[Florescu]

Thank you very much.
Problem solved