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    Recent Best Controversial
    • RE: V-Ray v.s. Fryrender?

      Jeepers, guys. There is a ton of stuff that renderers often ignore that makes it different from 'physical processes'. Renderers have improved hugely in the last 10 years but they are a loong way from 'reality'...

      A really common one is that they represent light by choosing just 3 frequencies at the low, middle and high frequency range to represent what is a continues function. ie Red,Green,Blue values rather than the response curve of the light.

      Adam

      posted in V-Ray
      AdamBA
      AdamB
    • RE: Undo Deleted Entities

      Jim,

      Yes, expected behavior - particularly with GC-ed languages. But also because the Ruby objects are just proxies of the 'real' objects buried inside SU proper, so I think the wrapper can change at any time, while the value is persistent for the lifetime of the underlying object.

      You have to tread very carefully when matching Entities. Even comparing EntityID isn't enough sometime - well thats what I found anyway. In LightUp I ended up just hashing the entity, which works great.

      Adam

      posted in Developers' Forum
      AdamBA
      AdamB
    • RE: SU view inside WebDialog

      Sounds a bit hacky..

      I'd just have a little extension that adds a SketchUp::View and then write a tiny webserver that serves the image up to the WebDialog on a known port. ie in your html, you'd have an iframe with a href of localhost:8080 or whatever.

      I've done this a few times in different scenarios and it works a treat - its a few kbytes of code.

      Adam

      posted in Developers' Forum
      AdamBA
      AdamB
    • RE: SQLite in SketchUp Ruby

      @unknownuser said:

      hmm, tried with SQLite3 using Native driver and it worked (it "hangs" SU until the SQL commands are finished as usual)

      Hey, I hadn't thought of that. Because Ruby uses green threads, driving SQL from Ruby in SU is going to give a horrible user experience - very 'lumpy' interaction. I really think its a non-starter because of that.

      Adam

      posted in Developers' Forum
      AdamBA
      AdamB
    • RE: SQLite in SketchUp Ruby

      Given things like this are going to use WebDialog, I'd planned to simply use server-side php to talk SQL

      Adam

      posted in Developers' Forum
      AdamBA
      AdamB
    • RE: [Solved] Translate along a plane, or from Plane to Plane

      You have a point in the plane and a plane normal, right.
      So just generate 2 orthogonal vectors that define your 2d plane and you have the 'origin' from the point the user selected in the plane.

      Now you've generated the affine transform just like 'align axis' does. ie you've got a x axis, a y axis and z axis and a translation.

      And yes, I know, you're going to say you'd like some Ruby code.. πŸ˜„ Got some other stuff to do, but I'll come back to this later.

      Adam

      posted in Developers' Forum
      AdamBA
      AdamB
    • RE: OBJ in SKP

      Posted a very simple (pure Ruby) obj importer sometime back as discussed here

      Adam

      posted in Developers' Forum
      AdamBA
      AdamB
    • RE: LightUp v1.2 is finally out

      @dave r said:

      Thank you Adam. I ran the resolution at 2cm and still had sharp edges on the bench cushion. 1cm worked better.

      Does adjusting the size of the light component have any impact on the light?

      Sorry DaveR, missed your post. 😞

      The Point Light component is not affected by its size because the light emenates from a single point of 0 area/volume. Area lights are effected by their size (ie area) so a larger area gives more light.

      Adam

      posted in Developers' Forum
      AdamBA
      AdamB
    • RE: White screen of death

      The whole point of pre-emptive multitasking is you can do what the hell you like and the system will ensure everything gets a fair crack of the whip - including the window system. Thats how every system apart from MS Windows works where you have to jump through hoops to allow users to continue to be able to use the UI and not freeze up. Its a bit sad.

      Adam

      posted in SketchUp Feature Requests
      AdamBA
      AdamB
    • RE: White screen of death

      @plot-paris said:

      would be awesome. a progress bar and estimated time (like several rubies do it already).
      and perhaps in addition to that the possibility to abort processes, when they take too long.

      re: WSOD

      You know, unfortunately this isn't a Google/Sketchup issue. Its a really annoying wrinkle of Windows that if you have a program working very hard, the Application windows appears to get repainted white - I find I get the same thing when I'm running LightUp while screencasting. I have progress bars etc in LightUp but they simply don't get 'run' by windows when you're really driving the CPU.

      So, just to be clear, I'm pretty certain this isn't some 'bad programming' by Google.

      As to aborting tasks, part of the problem is that the program never gets that "please abort" message because if you're really driving the...well, you know the rest! πŸ˜‰

      Adam

      posted in SketchUp Feature Requests
      AdamBA
      AdamB
    • RE: Where does the time go?

      @bigstick said:

      I have been tempted to buy LightUp, but the inaccuracy of the realtime rendering spoils it a bit for me. It looks like a very cool app though!

      Hey, I know we all wear different hats..but I'm really interested in trying to tease out the workflow issues of SketchUp here. LightUp is neat (well I would say that!) and its doing great but in a way I don't want to muddy the water with it.

      However, I'd very much appreciate it if you could PM me with me with more of your concerns wrt LightUp rendering - not sure what you mean, as its the user who chooses what quality you want - in the limit, LightUp performs identical calculations to a raytracer..

      Adam

      posted in Corner Bar
      AdamBA
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    • RE: Big File Sizes/ High Poly

      @plot-paris said:

      very small thing: I believe SU speeds up a bit, if you turn off profiles...

      Its not a small thing. It can have a quite significant impact on display update rate. Try it.

      posted in SketchUp Discussions
      AdamBA
      AdamB
    • RE: Where does the time go?

      Interesting. Thanks for taking the time..

      Let me refine my question because it strikes me we have an interesting mix of individuals that should be able to get some traction on this...

      I posed the question "Where does all the time go?" because I've become increasingly concerned that, with a scripting language like Ruby under SketchUp, it's possible to do pretty much anything you want. Launch Microsoft Outlook and send emails, send stuff to websites, look up databases, generate new geometry - whatever.

      But there are two related issues.

      First, if a task makes up 5% of the total effort of a project. Having talented individuals pour passion and effort into making rubies that make it 100% faster seems a bit of a waste to gain 2.5% productivity.

      And on a related note, we run the danger of losing the simplicity and clarity of a workflow built around a small number of powerful tools that is the bedrock of SketchUp. I guess I struggle to 'get' how people work with dozens of these (admitted very groovy) ruby plug-ins in practice.

      Take a slice through the cake that is a 'time spent on a project' and you find its not uniform; different phases of a project need different tools. What are those phases? Can they be broadly grouped? If they can, perhaps we should focus all these Extension gurus (hey and Google guys too) on providing 'palettes of tools', choose a palette of tools for each job/phase in hand and not this insane sea-of-buttons I've seen posted a few times now when users show screenshots.

      So back to my question. [And if there is a better way of forming this, do go right ahead.]
      Where does all the time go? Can we squint a little at the problem and define broad outlines of a project in which broad classes of tools are appropriate?

      Or do we leave SketchUp as a thing of beauty and top and tail it with other standalone applications that fulfill different phases? So, some kind of Content Management thing at the beginning for pulling together assets, a 'Sketchup classic' phase, visualization phase, export to raytracers, plotters, cutters etc.

      Some ideas anyway. And I know it will be easy for the reader to nod and say 'yep, thats sounds ok'. But I'm interested in your thoughts! So, if you have the time (and I've gotcha because you read this far!) reply with some thoughts - however big/small/unfinished.

      Or am I totally in the long grass here? I honestly don't think so, but I'm happy to hear some home truths!

      Have a good weekend!
      Adam

      posted in Corner Bar
      AdamBA
      AdamB
    • RE: This guy does cooler stuff than you

      @tomsdesk said:

      Gotta get me one of those! (The flame thrower, I mean...for my Sunday morning donut runs...since there's nothing, of course, more vicious on the road: than a Christian late for church :`)

      As somebody who loves messing with these 100mW lasers you can buy nowadays. I thought this was neat.

      Adam

      posted in Corner Bar
      AdamBA
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    • RE: Rendering plugins?

      @timetodoit said:

      Hi there, I'm a graphic designer that just started using sketchup it's really handy for some stuff that I need to make and then "treat" in photoshop.

      But the current render is very very bad.. Is there something better? I use a mac!

      Free would be awesome

      And you could try LightUp too. Its a free demo on both Mac and Windows and available here.

      posted in SketchUp Discussions
      AdamBA
      AdamB
    • RE: Wierd dimension glitch?

      My first thought was some kind of floating point rounding, however I can't duplicate that. I get 2'

      At a total guess, it just has the flavor of one of those times you find you're doing something silly..
      Check your Model Info preferences and Snap distances.

      Adam

      posted in Newbie Forum
      AdamBA
      AdamB
    • Where does the time go?

      An open question for you all.

      Where does the time go (how does it break down) in your projects using Sketchup?

      Its often useful to breakdown the existing workflows like this to reveal where we should all be focussing attention wrt Extensions to SketchUp - be that Google or others. The basic grunt work of knocking out geometry is often not the largest slice of time - eg once you have a model, its often pretty quick to duplicate it from scratch. So where does the time go actually?

      Adam

      posted in Corner Bar
      AdamBA
      AdamB
    • RE: Scaling cursor icon?

      Pixero,

      You can have different size cursors by using SetCursor as Jim suggested and using different sized images.

      ie create a 128x128 image for a huge cursor. However, you can't scale an existing cursor using Ruby.

      Adam

      posted in Developers' Forum
      AdamBA
      AdamB
    • Call for models that cause problems for LightUp

      Hi,

      Its been suggested to me that some have models that have caused problems/crashes for LightUp but don't want to 'upset the apple cart'!

      Please, the only way to fix bugs in (any) software is to get a repeatable problem. So, if you have a model that repeatably causes problems when using LightUp, don't feel you're going to cause offence - you'd be doing a Good Thing (tm) by sending it to me.

      Thanks!
      Adam

      posted in Developers' Forum
      AdamBA
      AdamB
    • RE: LightUp v1.2 is finally out

      @mike lucey said:

      Have no worries Adam, I'd say that Gallery will start to fill
      up very soon.

      Ancient Chinese proverb say "every gallery begins with the first submission" β˜€

      @mike lucey said:

      I had a look at your video tutorials and could not get the first
      one, 'Getting Started with 1.2', to run. Can you have a look at it?

      Mike

      I have looked and it "works for me" (TM). Did you just catch Youtube at the wrong time? Anyone else not able to watch this video (here)?

      Adam

      posted in Developers' Forum
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