Really, the thread creator should have researched a little before making such uninformed comments. Did he even try to take a photo at a totally closed room at night, a single 75 watts lightbulb, ISO 100, shutter speed at 1/60 and F8?

Really, he should have before "guessing" that it should be bright.
"Surely a 75 Watt bulb in a small box photographed with a real camera loaded with ISO 100 is going to be brightly lit."

No, it won´t.

Just made tests with my camera. A bedroom in my apartment with 2.8 x 3.3 meters. Two 75 watts lightbulbs. Room totally closed.

At the settings above, that the thread creator "thought" it should be bright, and therefore VRAY and Thea sucked... well, checkout below.

F8, ISO 100
shutter at 1/60

shutter at 1/30

shutter at 1/4

F4, ISO 100
shutter at 1/60

shutter at 1/30

shutter at 1/4

camera used: Canon SX130

ps: sorry for the hanging lamps. That´s the bottom of the ceiling fan. It happens the ceiling fan malfunctioned, so I opened it to see if there was any burned equipment, and somehow I lost the screws

worth mentioning however that if you create a low resolution TIN and it has a complex shape (like you made it with Soap Skin Bubble, or you have cut it after stamping) you might get some problems. Therefore if the plugin had automatic smoothing either after or before creating it, it would be very good.

Example... only move in the vertical vertexes that are at least 5 vertex from each other (or set a distance in meters instead of number of vertexes) and then the ones in the middle have their height calculate based on average/medians?

can´t live without it. Use it all the time to make terrain. Gee, even ramps I do with it.

Could this plugin be updated, (or in the case another plugin exists, please point me out)in order for a more smooth randomization to be possible? Right now, the plugin simply changes the vertical distance of every vertex in the TIN by the amount set by the user.

However, it creates some artifacts often due to the normals, and even not counting the artifacts, you just can´t get a smooth random terrain, specially if you want bigger random elevation...

Only way I found to achieve that was repeat the process inumerous times...

Create a TIN with Soap Box and Bubble in a way the squares will be like let's say 2x2 meters. Apply randomize TIN with 0,7 meters of vertical displacement.

Notice this is a low resolution terrain... but if you want high displacement with Random TIN, you need a low res terrain, otherwise you might have two points 20cm apart, one of them 1 meter high, and the other -1m!!

After randomizing with high displacement a low-res terrain, then you ADD DETAIL... run Randomize TIN again, this time with smaller vertical displacement (say, 0,3 meters), add detail again, run Randomize TIN again this time with 5cm only.

What when you ALREADY have the faces, but you have closed shapes inside that however won´t close (profiles won´t turn to edges), so the two surfaces will become different surfaces?

I have one here that I already projected onto a face, run stray lines, etc.

There are no stray lines. It was projected on a surface, I also did drape it onto another surface. Retraced everything. Nothing works!

I see. Thanks ThomThom, for looking at the issue.

Thank you Box. Any slight idea why Raytracer, Drop At Intersection, etc, are not working?

@tt_su said:

Hard to tell without a model...

Sorry, but when I posted and attached the model, I didnt notice it failed to upload the model because it was larger than the 4mb forum attachment limit.

I edited the first post and attached the model (now, 3mb)

Can someone help me? It´s kinda urgent. Basically, For some reason, the components are NOT dropping until the ground. I verified the axis of the component, verified everything, but it still doesn´t work. It´s also weird, but it doesnt work with the other plugin (Drop At Intersection) too!!

They drop only a few centimeters. Unless I "drop by bounding box", but then, when dropping by bounding box, the components follow the contour of the terrain (which gets pretty weird for lightpoles)

perguntadropcomponent.skp

@Box: thanks!!! Your method works flawlessly! I would have never thought of BZ Polyline Divider conversion!

@unknownuser said:

Option "Stretch" don't answer to your problem ?

not if you want EVERY component to remain the same size. Stretch will STRETCH the components to fit the same size as the segments.

from left to right
1- the component (which I want to remain always on that exact same size)and the path, made of two semicircles with same number of segments. However one semi-circle is larger than the other, thus the segments on the second semicircle are larger

2 - with uniform scaling

3 - with stretching

4 - no scaling. Thus, the components maintain their original size, exactly as I want. Too bad that THEN not only they do not touch each other as they also have different distances between them

@BOX: thanks for the tip. However, I needed to use CATENARY CURVES plugin to make the curves. Unless I can transform a catenary curve made with the plugin into a polyline with segments all the same size?

@chris fullmer said:

Hi Hu. There is no option for spacing. It always inserts a component at each line segment. There is no way to skip line segments, or evenly space components over uneven lengthed lines.

It should not stop after a single component though. Could you upload the test model where this happened? Thanks,

Chris

can´t you add the option?

Chains are such basic things, but there is really no useful plugin to make good chains at Sketchup. If you need to put a chain in a model with each chain link measuring the same size, and a specific size at that (lets say, 5cm for each link), there is simply no Plugin that can do it! Yours is the one that reaches closest (specially because of the component rotation), but the lack of component spacing instead of resizeing complicates it all for jobs where you want components to stay the same specific size, no matter the lenght of each segment in the curve.

Ok, so this plugin only puts the components at the curves/lines NODES.

Therefore, unless your curve has absolutely the same line size between nodes, you will either get components NOT touching each other or you will have (with selected option) some components stretched or resized to touch the other.

That does not makes for realistic chains in plenty of cases.

Is there any other plugin capable of doing a CHAIN, or maybe specialized at doing it?

@box said:

Yeah, I take it back, just made a new one with a 5sided 2mm round and no problems. So there is something screwed up in your file.

I will read a bit about quantum physics right now. Its certainly easier to understand than the inner workings of Sketchup

@dave r said:

If you were trying to use the process I outlined, it would fail because you are using groups, not components like I said to use.

I attached the original file. When I tried the process you outlined, I transformed each group in a component, but I did not sent THAT file because it did not work anyway, so I did not save it.

@box said:

Edit: I just noticed you are trying to do a 2mm round, I don't believe that is possible, it's simply too small. You may as well just soften the edge.

yes, the funny thing however is that I used the 2mm round on other files and it worked quite well. Also, as pointed out, I DID transform the models into components, scaled them up 100x and made 22 centimeters round. Still, the same error happened, so I suppose it´s not related to the scale of the model or the round.

@box said:

Do you have some hidden geometry hiding in the corners.

no

I attached the skp file, if anyone can check it...

4.skp

@dave r said:

The faces are too small and endpoints of lines are too close together. Reduce the number of segments used to create the radius. You don't need as many as you are using for that tiny radius anyway.You might also scale a copy of the component up before running the Round Corner plugin. Once you've finished editing the component, close the scaled up copy and delete it.

didnt work.I created copies of the components. Scaled them up and edited the big copies. Closed them. When I fix the model for errors, the errors still appear.

it´s all somewhat funny, because I am using the same roundcorner sizes at other furniture models and that problem is not ocurring on them!

edit... the problems occur EVEN when I deleted the original sized components from the model and left only the big ones. Then I run the script with 2 cm round corner instead of 2mm...

and when I try to fix the problems in the model, the same holes appear, in the 10x larger models!

@dave r said:

The units you're working in make no difference to whether or not the lines are too short.

doesn´t make much sense to me, in the moment you guys tell me I can create a component, increase its size and realize the operation on the large sized model. I mean, its a virtual enviroment, not the real world, why does it makes a difference zooming into the model or increasing it´s size?

I see. Would it help if I changed model units to millimiters? If not, I will try the other methods.

I have a problem with Roundcorner. I am trying to apply it on some furniture. As soon as I apply, everything looks good. But as soon as I try to save, Sketchup says there are problems on my model that need to be fixed. If I try to fix them, I lose most corners of the model.

Below, attached, is the log if I manually fix the model in the model info window. It results in a huge 1,3 mb txt file of error report!!!!!

and also an image showing the apparently well rounded corners, and then, the rounded corners after errors are fixed.

finally, you may ask: then why fix the erros? Just don´t fix them.

Unfortunatelly, I did not fix the errors, but when I saved the file to render with Thea Render, Thea interpreted the file (or saved it to be used at Thea Studio) with the open corners, as if Sketchup had fixed the errors.

roundcornererror.txt