@roland joseph said:

@unknownuser said:

Roland Joseph, from your images, it seems you only work with VERY planar streetscapes.

No...I live in Ontario. There is no flat ground in Ontario anywhere.....sorry Windsor is flat.

@unknownuser said:

It results in sideways sloped streets

No, you need to start with a relatively accurate mesh.
The roads can be contoured and flattened as per drawings manually with a projected image as a guide before you start building road mesh.

Just like building on the site. Once you have a road bed you can cut the roads in easily.

This example would represent a more typical street contour in Ontario.... http://ibuildmodels.com/JMC2/beaverton/intersections.html
All of it with TOS.

now, this is a very nice example with realistic terrain.

it would be awesome if you could show your workflow, from autocad drawings to the modelling of the streets and sidewalks, etc.

as I gather...

1 - you create a terrain from the elevation lines.

2 - you project an IMAGE of the project (including cities, etc) over the terrain, so you can flatten some surfaces for roads, etc. Can you give some more details on this workflow? Do you use the standard SKP terrain tools or Artisan?

3 - you use ToS to draw the streets, sidewalks, over the terrain, which is already painted with the image of the project, making it easy to paint it. (why you use ToS instead of DRAPING the DWG streets, etc?)

4 - you extrude stuff up (or maybe down, if you do with the streets) with Joint Push Pull?

@kenny said:

I agree with Box, the Sandbox tool should be fine for the example shown with the house.

For creating roads on a terrain the following script is very useful:
http://www.valiarchitects.com/subscription_scripts/instant-road-nui

They charge too much for a subscription based script, no matter how wonderful it is.

@pilou said:

City Gen Street generator by Thomthom ?

not sure... it was discontinued 6 years ago... does it even works on non planar lines? (like lines created with ToS over a mesh?)

@roland joseph said:

I do many streetscapes. I don't really understand the dialogue here. The example you provided is completed quickly with tools-on-surface. I see you already use TOS so now I'm really confused....Do you use TOS or soap skin?...hmmmm. Yes I'm totally lost now. Oh but wait! The title of the post is about making faces..... there is no face making required to complete the streets. Yikes!! I better leave

Roland Joseph, from your images, it seems you only work with VERY planar streetscapes.

@unknownuser said:

The example you provided is completed quickly with tools-on-surface

you mean, getting a terrain and just drawing the streets over it? Hmmm... nope. It results in sideways sloped streets and plenty of totally irrealistic bumps on streets and sidewalks. ToS does not generates surface meshes or faces anyway.

I use Soap Skin to generate meshes from contours.

Be them contours like the ones I showed on my skp (as I mentioned, I had the STREETS but the city blocks were only HOLES between the streets. I used Soap Skin to generate those meshes that are the city blocks... already included in the file) or be for example terrain around a house, where I will draw a line around the house, walls, etc and generate the terrain.

@pbacot said:

I would probably try to make a corner element with ramps etc. and duplicate it.

that sounds reasonable... but ONLY if all the corners are alike... in real grid streets. If you have streets that are more organic, you would have to create one different corner element for each corner...

edit: actually, even in my example it wouldn´t work out I guess, because the streets aren´t flat, so corners have different inclinations...

@pbacot said:

Just a side note wouldn't it be better to construct the sidewalks separately? Perhaps as an extrusion based on the street.

you mean an extrusion with Join Push Pull? Nope... the sidewalks are 4m for this project, and at that width, the curves on the block corners overlap in a geometric mess.

same thing if you try to do a follow_me or use the profile builder plugin.

@unknownuser said:

What is the end result? Streets amd sidewalks with "dirt"?

Nope. I will use the OFFSET function of ToolsOnSurface plugin... 15cm for curb and 3.85 meters for sidewalks.

Then I use Joint Push Pull and extrude the curbs, sidewalks and internal terrains, 15 centimeters up (using vector joint push pull)

@unknownuser said:

At first try it appears Toposhaper and Curviloft are not suited for this. Toposhaper doesn't keep to the edge of the street.

exactly. There are tons of other similar uses I have for SoapSkinandBubble that I can´t think how I would use Toposhaper or Curviloft.

ps: while playing with words on Google to find other plugins capable of the same thing, I found this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=45%26amp;v=WxQjAL11IB4

however, the mesh geometry seems to be quite random... not much suited to use with Sketchup terrain tools.

@pbacot said:

Still the main question: it depends on what you are making and what is the best way to layout the parameters of the shape. Curviloft is good for my needs (usually terrain sculpting) as well as Toposhaper or any plugin that creates a usable grid that can be shaped with Vertex tools or Artisan etc. And still I am always looking at different tools for different situations.

neither TopoShaper nor Curviloft work for what I mentioned here, as far as I am aware. At least I tried both and TopoShaper doesn´t work properly and Curviloft doesn´t even create a surface, so maybe the problem is myself, not these two plugins.

Anyway, I am attaching a skp file with a street grid. Above the street grid I extruded the border lines following the streets contours.

Must find faces for those contours, so we can generate sidewalks, internal terrain, etc.

I generated the meshes with Soap Skin & Bubble, than positioned them in the streets.

But for tests, you can use the blocks border lines, then generate the meshes with TopoShaper or Curviloft or other method of preference, and please, share the methods here...

cityblock tests.rar

@pilou said:

Expired ?
This Plugin is a Time-Limited Demo

I am aware of that. The time limit was 15 april 2015.

@unknownuser said:

NO
@unknownuser said:

Time Limit is April 10, 2016

this is the new time-limit, it was updated yesterday.

as you are probably aware, Soap Skin and Bubble has a time limit of 1 year for each new version, and the new version with the new extended 1 year time-limit is only released like 1 day prior to the time-limit expiring date of the previous version

@unknownuser said:

@unknownuser said:

Soap Skin and Bubble and it crashed?

I never see it crashed!

well, the website (extension warehouse) was offline for most of the morning here.

Yes, there is a question, exactly because I may be suffering from the problem you described... and Soap Skin and Bubble just expired and http://extensions.sketchup.com/ is offline for the last 2-3 hours (maybe too many people tried to download Soap Skin and Bubble and it crashed?)

Also, SOMETIMES Soap Skin and Bubble creates some meshes that are a headache.

But really, I don´t know any other way to do these things... so if you find it limiting and thinks there are better ways (either manual or plugins) share it, please. Thanks

My method is to use Soap Skin and Bubble plugin. That´s basically the only reason I use the plugin, since I hardly work with tensile structures

Instead, it allows me for example to draw the contour of a terrain around a house and then generate the terrain which will smoothly follow that complex shape.

Anyone knows where the Plugin stores it´s library of profiles?

I find no way to select different profiles, and when clicking "browse" (the mag glass button) it takes me to "My Documents" folder, where there are several skp files but no library as far as I know.

Has anyone tried to use Profile Builder 2 to build curtain walls?

I guess we could set components for mullions and such... not sure how to make the glass (specially if you want single planes as glass to render using "architectural glass" material (instead of using heavier materials for glass where the render will calculate light dispersion and such)

I guess vertical mullions as components and horizontal mullions AND glass as profiles?

no word from this brilliant plugin yet?

@panixia said:

@aceshigh said:

electricity poles connected by electrical wires (the wires would be an arc... planar shearing them when the poles have different heights would be better looking than rotating the arcs)

maybe you could be also interested in this cool pugin.. i find it more specific for that kind of stuff you're saying..

SketchUp Plugins | PluginStore | SketchUcation

SketchUp Plugin and Extension Store by SketchUcation provides free downloads of hundreds of SketchUp extensions and plugins

(sketchucation.com)

thanks Panixia. I know that plugin. It´s better for joining a few electricity poles. But what if you want to place 100 poles with the wires?

@whaat said:

@aceshigh said:

since this is now the official thread, bringing here the question I made on the other one:

@whaat said:

Hi Aces,

That's a difficult one to do with the plugin. In general, it is designed for profiles to be used to connect the components. You should be able to create a polyline profile for the wire mesh instead of a component but it won't be as realistic as what you are trying to achieve. Thanks for the feedback!

Whaat, wouldn´t you be able to achieve that by using code similar to FredoScale's Planar Shearing? It´s easy to think of other things that would benefit from it, like electricity poles connected by electrical wires (the wires would be an arc... planar shearing them when the poles have different heights would be better looking than rotating the arcs)

If I keep getting requests about this, I will definitely consider it, thanks!

no, thank you for considering the possibility of considering it

one more question... will there be a user manual?

and maybe I am missing something, but is there a way to update the built structure in case you decide to change some parameters, or we have to delete and build it again?

@tt_su said:

@aceshigh said:

@nghminh81 said:

Thanks so much Oxer and MTriple. Your file works perfectly with my sketchup 2014!

To anyone who using Windows and still can't install it: Please extract files(ComposprayToolbar.rb and 1 folder Compospray) to "C:\Program Files (x86)\SketchUp\SketchUp 2014\Tools".

DON'T EXTRACT FILES TO "C:\Users\XX\AppData\Roaming\SketchUp\SketchUp 2014\SketchUp\Plugins"
AND IF THEY WERE THERE (Because you tried to install it) Just DELETE.

following your method, it is now working with Sketchup 2015.

I don´t even know why I try installing by using the rbz file from inside Sketchup. With Sketchup 7 and 8 I installed 99% of the extensions by unzipping into the plugins folder.

I would strongly recommend to NOT follow that advice. Windows tries to enforce a strict lock down to Program Files. On many systems extensions will not be able to write to that location - which often they want to.
I suspect that some of the issue in this case is due to non-English characters in the username. This should in theory be fixed in Ruby 2.0 - but there appear to be some bugs in the Windows version of Ruby. It should however be possible for the developers to work around this. Hard to tell exactly in this case without knowing the source.

To work around this until the developer have a chance to update the extension you can try to install to the AllUser profile:

C:\ProgramData\SketchUp\SketchUp 2015\SketchUp

AFIK that should not have unicode characters. Create a Plugins folder and extract the RBZ content there. (Rename RBZ to ZIP and extract like you did in SU6-SU8).

User should really not be modifying files in Program Files. Windows will fight back.

but weren´t all plugins installed to Program Files in Sketchup 7 and 8?

@nghminh81 said:

Thanks so much Oxer and MTriple. Your file works perfectly with my sketchup 2014!

To anyone who using Windows and still can't install it: Please extract files(ComposprayToolbar.rb and 1 folder Compospray) to "C:\Program Files (x86)\SketchUp\SketchUp 2014\Tools".

DON'T EXTRACT FILES TO "C:\Users\XX\AppData\Roaming\SketchUp\SketchUp 2014\SketchUp\Plugins"
AND IF THEY WERE THERE (Because you tried to install it) Just DELETE.

following your method, it is now working with Sketchup 2015.

I don´t even know why I try installing by using the rbz file from inside Sketchup. With Sketchup 7 and 8 I installed 99% of the extensions by unzipping into the plugins folder.

tried installing the latest version at 2015 and all I get when I use the ruby console with your commands above is "Error: No such file or directory"

this is the message I get when starting SKP2015

Error Loading File compoSprayToolbar.rb
Error: No such file or directory - C:/Users/Usuário/AppData/Roaming/SketchUp/SketchUp 2015/SketchUp/Plugins/CompoSpray/CompoSprayUS.lingvo
c:/users/usuário/appdata/roaming/sketchup/sketchup 2015/sketchup/plugins/compospray/compoutils.rbs:999:in readlines' c:/users/usuário/appdata/roaming/sketchup/sketchup 2015/sketchup/plugins/compospray/compoutils.rbs:999:in cs_translate'
c:/users/usuário/appdata/roaming/sketchup/sketchup 2015/sketchup/plugins/compospray/compoutils.rbs:50:in compSpray_env' C:/Users/Usuário/AppData/Roaming/SketchUp/SketchUp 2015/SketchUp/Plugins/compoSprayToolbar.rb:9:in <top (required)>'

which is weird, because there IS that path with those files inside. Here, right clicked at CompoSprayUS.lingvo and in properties copied it´s path:

C:\Users\Usuário\AppData\Roaming\SketchUp\SketchUp 2015\SketchUp\Plugins\CompoSpray

the only difference to the path I get at the SKP error message is the direction of the slash characters... backslash in properties, forward slash in Sketchup error window...

C:/Users/Usuário/AppData/Roaming/SketchUp/SketchUp 2015/SketchUp/Plugins/CompoSpray/

since this is now the official thread, bringing here the question I made on the other one:

@whaat said:

Hi Aces,

That's a difficult one to do with the plugin. In general, it is designed for profiles to be used to connect the components. You should be able to create a polyline profile for the wire mesh instead of a component but it won't be as realistic as what you are trying to achieve. Thanks for the feedback!

Whaat, wouldn´t you be able to achieve that by using code similar to FredoScale's Planar Shearing? It´s easy to think of other things that would benefit from it, like electricity poles connected by electrical wires (the wires would be an arc... planar shearing them when the poles have different heights would be better looking than rotating the arcs)

@whaat said:

Hi Aces,

That's a difficult one to do with the plugin. In general, it is designed for profiles to be used to connect the components. You should be able to create a polyline profile for the wire mesh instead of a component but it won't be as realistic as what you are trying to achieve. Thanks for the feedback!

Whaat, wouldn´t you be able to achieve that by using code similar to FredoScale's Planar Shearing? It´s easy to think of other things that would benefit from it, like electricity poles connected by electrical wires (the wires would be an arc... planar shearing them when the poles have different heights would be better looking than rotating the arcs)

The demo looks awesome, but there are some improvements that could be made... or maybe I just don´t know how to use it properly yet.

Let´s say you want to build a fence with a wire mesh.

You set the poles as components. But it seems the plugin was made so the parts connecting the two components should be profiles, otherwise they won´t properly connect in more complex patterns.

Here...

I created two components... the concrete pole and the wire mesh, which is a surface with some ondulation for more realism

Now, this is what happens when using the Plugin. The mesh component, which should connect every two poles, is only rotated in the X and Y directions...

And this is what I would like the plugin to do. I did this manually. I placed the mesh component at an anchor point at the concrete pole. Rotated it horizontally (plugin already does it) so it would properly connect to anchor point in next pole. Then with FREDOSCALE I stretched it to reach the anchor point of next pole (when distance between poles was not exact.

And the most important: I used Fredoscale PLANAR SHEARING, so the connection would be perfect. If this plugin could automatically do these steps I described above, including the shearing, it would be perfect.