Questions on Styles and Rendering options

[fredo6]

I am a little bit lost with this, at least on 2 points

1. What is the model.styles.active_style?
   Is it a way to save the current style information to replay it later?
   What is the difference with styles.selected_style?
   For sure, if the following statement create an immediate bug plat. Don't know if this is a bug or a misunderstanding of the difference

style_active = styles.active_style
styles.selected_style = style.active

2. The model or page rendering options des not include ALL information on styles.

At least I found that is a scene is formatted with the style "Brush Stroke Wide", the model.rendering_options or page.rendering_options does not contain all information necessary to replay the same rendering as the style from the Ruby API.

The API documentation is very elusive, in general, and in particular on styles and rendering options.

Thanks for your thoughts

Fredo

[thomthom]

@fredo6 said:

For sure, if the following statement create an immediate bug plat. Don't know if this is a bug or a misunderstanding of the difference

> style_active = styles.active_style
> styles.selected_style = style.active
> 

Anything causing a crash is to be considered a bug.

For the record, the complete snippet to reproduce the crash with all variables defined and without typo is:

styles = Sketchup.active_model.styles
style_active = styles.active_style
styles.selected_style = style_active

Fredo, I'll look at this on Monday. I was just skimming the forum right now.

[fredo6]

thomthom,

Thanks for raising the point within Trimble.

But do you know what is the difference between active_style and selected_style?

Fredo

[driven]

I have played around with styles, rendering options and shadow option in a couple of plugins

but I could never work that one out...

styles = Sketchup.active_model.styles

p styles.selected_style == styles.active_style # => false

p styles.selected_style.name == styles.active_style.name  # => true

and

p [styles.selected_style, styles.active_style]
# => [#<Sketchup;;Style;0x007ff13ba9a590>, #<Sketchup;;Style;0x007ff13975fb20>]

p [styles.selected_style.name, styles.active_style.name]
# => ["[Default Style]", "[Default Style]"]

I'll see if I can find my revert style code...

[driven]

finally found the bit I was after...
I grab the active style and collect the missing values...

        styles = Sketchup.active_model.styles
        @count = styles.count
        sty = styles.active_style
        @revert = 0
        @i = 0
        styles.map{|s| @i = @i+1
                       @revert =  @i-1 if s.name == sty.name
                  }

        # collect items not covered by Style options...
        sun4 = Sketchup.active_model.shadow_info["UseSunForAllShading"]
        shad = Sketchup.active_model.shadow_info["DisplayShadows"]
        dark = Sketchup.active_model.shadow_info["Dark"]
        light = Sketchup.active_model.shadow_info["Light"]
        faces = Sketchup.active_model.shadow_info["DisplayOnGroundPlane"]
        ground = Sketchup.active_model.shadow_info["DisplayOnAllFaces"]

then at the end of my async loop that changes styles and makes an image I use

                styles.selected_style = styles[@revert]
                Sketchup.active_model.shadow_info["UseSunForAllShading"] = sun4
                Sketchup.active_model.shadow_info["DisplayShadows"] = shad
                Sketchup.active_model.shadow_info["Dark"] = dark
                Sketchup.active_model.shadow_info["Light"] = light
                Sketchup.active_model.shadow_info["DisplayOnGroundPlane"] = ground
                Sketchup.active_model.shadow_info["DisplayOnAllFaces"] = faces

to put it back as it was...

[driven]

@dan
what's not working?

 model = Sketchup.active_model
 pages = model.pages
 page = pages[0]
 rendering_settings = page.rendering_options.to_a

returns the full enchilada...
and shadow info appears to work on page as well...

 shadow_settings = page.shadow_info.to_a

can you post a failing snippet I can test on my mac?

john

[fredo6]

@driven
Thanks for your samples. It would seem that the Active Style is a structure to hold the current options set interactively (and normally in rendering_options and Shadow_info), whereas the Selected Style only corresponds to styles stored in the model and coming from files. But as the API to styles is very poor, there is little chance that anything useful can be done.

@Dan
Page.rendering_options seems to work OK in SU15, even if it does not map all the parameters of styles.

Fredo

[Dan Rathbun]

I am going from memory. This was several versions back, may have been while Google still owned SketchUp.

What I was trying to do was SET rendering options/styles that were unique to each page.

I was told (if I remember correctly) is that since Styles were invented, you have to use style files.

I responded that (generalizing) this was cumbersome if I only wished to change a few options on each page.

@fredo6 said:

page.rendering_options seems to work OK in SU15...

It did for me, also in that older version. But setting things (different than the model settings,) and having them remembered seems to be the issue.

Notice how in the Scene Manager, there is no checkbox for "rendering options"

Setting the page.use_rendering_options=true has no effect.

---

For the shadow_info, there an additional flag that must be set true, to make the changes remembered.
page.use_shadow_info= true page.update

[Dan Rathbun]

I asked someone on the SketchUp development team last year (I think, could have been before,) about the page.rendering_options not working.

They said it was replaced with styles when styles were invented. And that the API docs were erroneous with respect to setting rendering options on pages. (It should say that they do not work when attempting to make settings on pages.)

To which I responded that made no sense, as nothing much of the Style class had been exposed. Why would take away API functionality? And the response was something vague, about future plans that never happened.

[tt_su]

Sorry Fredo for the late reply. I just looked up the source for this. Though it looks like you deduced this yourself, here's confirming it:

selected_style refer to the style selected in the Style browser. However, the user might have modified that style after selecting it. So it's properties doesn't reflect what's being used in the viewport.

active_style refer to the "working" style.

The API interface is a reflection off the underlying system. But it's certainly awkward. Better documentation and examples are needed. And I guess there is a need for some new API methods.

[fredo6]

thomthom,

thsanks very much.

So active_style is finally not useful, as we cannot do anything with it.

Fredio

[CadFather]

api definitely needs some development here, you cannot even do a style.erase command. (just purge)

i looked inside a *.style file (aka zip), hoping to find some hints. some obscure numbers which surely must be pointing to the settings like face colours etc, but too cryptic.

not to mention watermarks.