Sure you could use grep, sed etc but wait, what if we had a scripting language in Sketchup that had good file reading capability, powerful regular expression matching, and a binding to the Sketchup geometry API etc. I guess we can only hope. Seriously, something like this works fine: IO.foreach("my_inputfile.ext") { |aline| /^(\S*) ([^$]*)/.match(aline) verb = $1 rest = $2 case verb ....whatever you need to do here eg entities.add_face, entities.add_group etc } This is my mickey mouse .obj importer I use for Sketchup: pos = [] tex = [] group = nil IO.foreach("/tmp/test.obj") { |aline| /^(\S*) ([^$]*)/.match(aline) verb = $1 rest = $2 case verb when "s" # ignore smoothing group when "v" # close current group if group pos = [] tex = [] group = nil end / (\S*) (\S*) (\S*)/.match(rest) pos.push Geom;;Point3d.new($1.to_f,$2.to_f,$3.to_f) when "f" if /(\S*)\/(\S*) (\S*)\/(\S*) (\S*)\/(\S*)/.match(rest) vertices = [pos[$1.to_i], pos[$3.to_i], pos[$5.to_i]] elsif /(\S*) (\S*) (\S*)/.match(rest) vertices = [pos[$1.to_i], pos[$2.to_i], pos[$3.to_i]] end group.entities.add_face vertices when "g" # open a new group /(\S*)/.match(rest) group = Sketchup.active_model.entities.add_group group.name = $1 puts "group(#{$1})" end } Adam

Uau, muito boa essa ferramenta, meus parabéns amigo. Obrigado por compartilhar.

Never mind - I was also "enlightened" by a Google employee when I first put my hand on SU 7 last year.

@a4chitect said: [color=#4080BF]short tutorial: installation: 1. extract the provided zip file into your Sketchup\Plugins folder Future ... 3.allow the choice of closing after launch to be saved/remembered This plugin might be a solution to the instability i noticed when too many icons are shown on sketchup screen one minor problem: only one operation at a time, the dialog box can not stay opened, even if i uncheck the "close" rectangle so i have to re open it each time i need it; any other solution?

Thanks you very much

I was certain that after trying "darkred" sketchup returned an error, but now the same "darkred" works as expected - thanks!!

no, sorry for causing confusion. this is only helpful when developing tool plugins and you want to use keyboard to control your tool behavior, you need a code of each key so that you can specify what to look for. these codes are nowhere to be found (su ruby api) so only way I found is to run the key discovery tool posted above and pressing keyboard print respective codes to the ruby console.

@a4chitect said: could someone help me understand why when editing spline sometimes the selecting cursor is a black filled square and sometimes it is an empty square? the filled cursor can't be locked to axes when moving while the empty square can and also snaps to geometry better. I could't recognize any apparent reason why sometimes I get the filled one and sometimes don't. thanks By the way, you seem to use the older version which had bugs about inferences. I have made a correction in the release of January 2008, which is on Crai Depot (see also http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=5429)

So... it looks like either you haven't got FULL permissions to read/write to the MAC's Plugins folder [fix them] OR you are using the wrong 'plugins' folder. It should be the Macintosh HD 'plugins' folder NOT the 'user' one ! There are dozens of threads already about which is the correct MAC 'plugins' folder and 'permissions' Search SCF for some key-words... Incidentally there are now many scripts/toolsets better than this one... Search the SCF Plugins Index - e.g. Thomthom's 'Cleanup'...

I found this old thread and thought I would add an update. I've been working with the author of NGPlant to implement collada export. The latest version is pretty neat and creates trees with instanced leaves as SU components. NGP is a cool application. It's an open source cross platform WYSIWYG tree generator. More info here:- http://ngplant.sourceforge.net I created some video tutorials on Vimeo for building trees with NGP. The tricky thing is to get realistic trees with a manageable poly count.

@a4chitect said: FUNCTIONALITY: it welds vertices (moves them to one spot and tries to weld colinear edges) selected by a 'fence' (thx to whaat for lot of lines of code) USAGE NOTE: select all geometry you want to weld prior to launching the script, then choose the vertices to weld by drawing a virtual 'fence' NOTE 4 RUBY CODERS: script is pretty dirty but the main part is useful for selecting vertices in view - feel free to use it licence: your only duty is to share any improvements and/or upgrades of this code under this same condition thanks to Juan V Soler for inspiration to make this [attachment=1:3ism2iv0]<!-- ia1 -->vertex-weld-result.png<!-- ia1 -->[/attachment:3ism2iv0] History 12.04.2008 v1.2 *now it lets you specify your welding spot by cycling through all possible positions Plugins/Vertex Weld (From Selection) -> Weld with Feedback specify weld region with your mouse [i]then* cycling LEFT / RIGHT ARROW confirm ENTER[/i]

If a possible application would be contour maps generated from grayscale images, then it's been done. Check the SketchUp Pro user group boards, and look at some OLD ruby stuff. I can't remember the names of things, but TBD had one, and maybe Dider had something.

I wouldnt want to image the maths involved in offsetting something on a curved plane, offsetting a planar line/polyline is what I was trying to achieve... but since you mentioned offsetting a curve on a surface - that would mean offsetting a 3d curve - which could come very handy - for a lots of applications . If there is anything that could be done to help you with this development - let me know.

It's a security problem. The plugin must write the points.txt in the qhull directory, but it's in programfile directory and the plug have'nt the autorization to write there... So Qhull can't read the file because don't exist ! 2 solutions : give full autorization to the Qhull directory (bad thing but works) change the place to the qhull directory and modify the .rb to point it (I don't try...)

I've been toying around on AWS today and I realised something. One of the RGAL's dependencies is Qt3. The precompiled CGAL library in the Ubuntu repository is NOT compiled with Qt3. This means that you have to compile CGAL yourself which is always a hassle. I don't know about other platforms though. It's possible that mac's precompiled CGAL works a charm If bootstrap fails at rb_Nef_polyhedron_3.cpp because it can't find qapplication.h, you have two options. *Either comment out the show method in the cpp file (dont forget to comment out the rice refference to it at the bottom of the file) and the two lines (qapplication and Qt_widget) in the rb_Nef_polyhedron_3.h file *Or get your act together and compile CGAL from scratch remembering to set the Qt3 flag to true. Ideally, it would be nice to have the Nef_polyhedron return a qt_widget object that ruby can then put in its own qt application. I have the feeling that that just isn't possible though.

@alz said: I wish there was a way to simply rebuild the whole Context Menu. Or if not possible, then allow plugin context menus to be places at the top, instead of the bottom. If you want to get crazy, how about a radial pie menu? Or if not possible, a quad menu (4 context menus cornered to each other... similar to what 3ds MAX has). Each quad would be devoted to a commmon action, like Current Selection, Object Management (layers), Tools, Editor (axis, globals, etc.). BTW, I did find if you simply rename your ruby script, you can change the order where it appears in the menus. For example, if you want options in Zoo.rb to come before Ape.rb, then rename them to 00_Zoo.rb and 01_Ape.rb. +1 for this. fully agree-

I find Notepad++ easy and nice. Here please find some files which makes ruby editing in Notepad++ easier. The ruby.xml goes to plugins/API folder and the stylers.xml goes into C:\Documents And Settings(users)\application support\notepad++ (or something like that... I wish I had windows right now). Further instructions in the notepad++ website. ruby.xml makes the autocompletion easy. Happy scripting!!! Notepad++ autoCompletion for ruby and Sketchup

Any news would be a surprise

This is not for Mac OSX is it?