@tig said:

My new SuperDrape drapes colored surfaces from one group onto another's surfaces...
You want a similar tool but instead of coloring faces in the second group it colors groups/instances within it ? It'd be somewhat easier to do that SuperDrape - you need to have a grouped set of colored faces [the 'logo', say] and a grouped set of groups/instances. A raytest from the center of every 'instance' detects the material above it and repaints that 'instance'...
Is that what you mean ??

your plugin is awesome, but its not the same use I thought here. I thought about it when using Zorro, when depending the camera angle, the cut is different (the cut is always related to the camera angle... straight behind to infinity.

I think a "selection mask" is more like it. I dont really "want it" since I dont even really have an immediate use for it right now. But I guess it might had been of use to me in past long finished projects, as well as to other people, in the future. No hurry. And I would like to know if anyone else think it might be useful. If noone thinks its useful nor any use to it, dont waste your time with this idea.

Well, the title is probably confusing, so let me explain my idea here:

imagine you have a stadium... thousands of seats, each seat is a component or group. You want to draw symbols with the seats. Maybe a logo. How to do it? Selecting each seat one by one??? It would be even worse if you wanted a pattern across all the seats in the stadium... imagine having to select 10 thousand seats to be able to change their color and make the pattern!!

imagine you have a skyscraper. Each window is a group/component. You want to select a checkered pattern, so you can change the components to another type of window.

imagine any other similar situation, where you have many, many groups/components, and you want to select them in complex shapes. And doing it one by one would take hours, not to mention the possibility of screwing up the selection and having to start it all over again.

WHAT IF we could make a selection based on a DRAWN SHAPE??

Example: you import the Coca Cola logo into sketchup. You draw the lines over the Coca Cola logo. You take those lines, make them into a group. You position that group over the universe of objects you want to select.

Now, I thought of two options... either you have to resize the lines group over the universe of objects you want to select, or maybe you could do as in Zorro... relative to view... in that case, even if your lines group is small, if its near the camera, it can be used to make a selection over a huge area in the background.

Anyway... the "lines group" (lets call it "Selector Group"?) must have closed lines... maybe the ideal would be to have faces (but then you would need to make the faces semi transparent) to see whats behind?

so, you select the "Selector Group", use the plugin, and it selects everything behind it that falls INSIDE the shape. Maybe we can have an option, so only objects COMPLETELY inside the shape are selected, or any objects touching the "selector group" shape projection

This is just a rough idea... I can think of some other uses for this plugin... I wonder if anyone else thinks the idea is interesting and worth a try?

great plugin! Thanks a lot!

thanks a lot, although wood framed houses are virtually non existant in my country.

@SDMitch:

I tested the new version you sent me via PM...
AWESOME!! Now it works flawlessly... ability to choose which mesh to keep and which to clip, and best of all... no gaps left between the meshes!!!

the only other thing that would be great would be if Sketchup could better select new meshes to add (right now, it always resets to the original mesh location, when you are going to add a new mesh... its a stupid system), but as I have been told, you cant modify that with a plugin... but surely enough, your plugin is already incredibly awesome and will save me days of tedious stupid work having to cut all the meshes with Zorro.

Thanks a lot. You should create a topic for the plugin. Other people might get interested.

@aceshigh said:

if all else fails, a plugin that culd transform a mesh into a solid would be awesome already. IF we could transform a mesh into a solid easily, it would also be pretty easy to perform Boolean operations (using the Solid Tools from SKP8 or OSCoolean plugin)and get the desired result.

actually, turning the meshes into solids and then making boolean operations are maybe not the best solution. Just did that (through a too complicated process that would take days and days to perform if I had hundreds of meshes*) and when I had the two solids out of the meshes, I tried to perform a boolean and got a BUGSPLAT!

I can only imagine how many bugsplats I would get when trying to do 100 different booleans out of complicated solid meshes in the same model

*basically, I drew a rectangle underneath the mesh, the selected only the mesh edges and used TIG´s Extrede Edges By Vector, and then intersected the extruded edges with the rectangle.

deleted the rectangle then deleted all the faces BELOW the rectangle, then the lines...

@jolran said:

Maybe you could build a box "underneath" the surface and do standard boolean on that?

maybe I am doing something wrong, but I just cant build the box underneath the surface. I draw the lines but they do not create the faces of the box.

if all else fails, a plugin that culd transform a mesh into a solid would be awesome already. IF we could transform a mesh into a solid easily, it would also be pretty easy to perform Boolean operations (using the Solid Tools from SKP8 or OSCoolean plugin)and get the desired result.

@Oscarlok:

can you make OSCoolean work with faces/meshes? Like subtract a cube from a mesh/face?

@sdmitch said:

If the two meshes are the same scale,ie grabed with the same zoom, the grids should be the same size and origin. Then you only need to delete the outer row/col in the overlap area as per John's procedure. I have successfully ran several test using John's procedure and the results is seamless.

well, but thats one problem. The meshes hardly will be the same zoom...
specially if you want to add a very large area, for distant background (like mountains, hills), and a smaller area, with detail, where you will render the image/movie.

Sdmitch, sorry if I am talking nonsense, specially since I dont even know the method you used in your plugin.

anyway, maybe you can just do an "automatic" way of doing what I did manually?

basically:

we have two different meshes

view them from top, parallel camera

use Zorro plugin (I dont know if you can use the code of another plugin) and CUT one mesh from the other. The Zorro cut line should follow the edge lines of the other mesh. IF its difficult using the Terrain Mesh as a basis for the CUT LINES, maybe its possible to use the SNAPSHOT (which are flat surfaces) edge lines as a basis for cutting the mesh with Zorro? Then delete what was cut from the mesh.

@driven said:

if you view an 'Add Location' 'Terrain' with 'Top View' [ON] + 'Parallel Projection' [ON]+ 'Hidden Geometry' [ON] + 'Face Style .. Shaded' you will see that the mesh is regular EXCEPT for the border.

If you 'Unlock' this 'Terrain' then select all followed by alt/shift/selection-Box over the good mesh it will leave the borders selected for deletion.

The is under all the GE terrains, if you delete the borders, this good mesh will align with its neighbors.

A useful plugin only needs to 'Unlock Terrain' >> 'Select Borders' >> 'Delete Border Mesh'.

When you do this to a set of overlapping terrains they do mesh, but you can also delete the overlaps before exploding all into a new single mesh. I found I rarely needed to even intersect after this process.

I've got a half done tutorial if your interested.

john

yes, I am interested John. I got a bit lost on your explanation, the tutorial would help.

the new version is working very well. The ability to change the order worked well and was definitly important (I made the test with two meshes in different resolutions... first time I tried, the higher res mesh was deleted... I reversed the order and was able to keep the higher res mesh. Even if I have to undo and redo the operation selecting the other option, its still like 1/10th of the time needed to manually ZORRO (use the Zorro plugin) to subtract one mesh from the other. Maybe 1/20th of the time!

Multiply that by 100 different meshes and you get a HUGE time gain!

Thanks a lot. Hope you find a solution to the small gaps betwen meshes, which can be weird when rendering a close-up animation.

if thats not possible I wonder if there is some plugin I can use to create some small cover for the gap? Like, joining the two meshes?

@sdmitch said:

It all depends on the order that it finds them in the model so the selection order doesn't matter.

thanks. Can you make it matter? I was editing my above message while you were writing here, and I said the reason the order would be important.

btw, I also noticed there is usually a small gap created between the two meshes. Maybe the bounding box from Sketchup is not perfectly parallel to the mesh edges?

I am also attaching two meshes where some triangles disappear when running the plugin. Maybe if we could invert the order it result in no missing triangles, I am not sure.

test01.skp

wow, thanks a lot!

it works flawlessly!

does it makes any difference which mesh I select first and 2nd?

how the plugin decides from which mesh it will subtract and which one it will keep intact?

this is important because sometimes you may have two meshes at different resolutions... and you may want to keep the higher resolution mesh.

I just made a test where the smaller, hi-res mesh was almost entirely deleted (only left a thin strip, that was outside the bounding box of the bigger mesh), while the ideal solution would be to keep the higher res mesh and cut the hole in the bigger, lower res mesh.

again, thanks a lot!

you did that manually?

@thomthom said:

@aceshigh said:

and got some error messages

What where the error message?

something along these lines (not exactly the same because I had to test again, with new Earth imported meshes, so different triangles disappeared, etc)

Results of Validity Check.

CEdge (4234) and CEdge (7926) connect the same 2 vertices - fixed
The plane equation for CFace (4767) is not valid - fixed

35 errors occurred. Please report the error and sample model to the author.

35 - Face merge resulted in lost geometry!

@chris fullmer said:

bleah, the edges are not necessarily co-planar. So its not easy to drop vertical lines at the corners and turn the thing into a big cube.

Bummer,

Chris

I would give you some suggestions... if I even knew what you mean

doesnt Sketchup have absolute world coordinates? Wouldnt the vertical lines just drop till a specific absolute world coordinate, at all 4 corners of an imported mesh?

hi Chris. I just imported two small GoogleEarth meshes, using Sketchup 8.

600 triangles each (i suppose... each one had 300 faces).

still no luck. There was overlapping and nope, the triangles from each mesh did not mach perfectly the triangles from the other mesh.

@thomthom said:

@aceshigh said:

@thomthom said:

Looking at the one you sent, I selected everything and intersected it with itself a few times. CleanUp doesn't clean up faces that partially overlaps. Only faces that fully cover the exact same space as another. After intersecting and then cleaning there was no overlapping.

I will try that, thanks... however... how can I intersect if they are not solids?

ps: I am trying to solve, with CleanUp, about the same problem that made me ask for the "GoogleEarth Meshes boolean subtract" plugin at the topic http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=40555

Not intersecting with Solid Tools, but the regular intersect that's been in SU since, ever..?

since ever, but I had never seen or used it before

anyway, however, intersected it with itself several times, and when I used cleanup³, several triangles were lost, and got some error messages