Does anyone know how to determine which .rb file defined a class, or a good way to search all .rb files in Plugins folder, or in all of windows to see which ones contain 'Class Area' or 'Area' (starting with a capital letter)?

Then I could narrow things down.

We have a plugin which uses .volume on entities but for one user is returning a value of the class Area rather than a number.

Is anyone aware of a plugin which defines Area or which overrides Entity.volume?

or did you want to automatically rename the textures stored in the material to match the name of the material itself.

This gets tricky because the SketchUp material can have names like: a'b/c, while a'b/c would not be a legal name for the texture itself.

or did you mean that you wanted to rename the material itself to match the texture name included in the material?

Would you like to rename color only materials in SketchUp (not materials with textures) so the name matches the color (eg. RGB 255,0,0 becomes red), for common colors and the hex color for non-standard colors (e.g. RGB 100,200,100 becomes #64c864)

One "problem" we found recently is that people don't call RGB 0,255,0 green - but rather call it lime- and call 0,128,0 green

as in this chart:

We are running a number of Webinars on Rendering with SketchUp.

This one - Sketchup Client Presentations - is valuable for all SketchUp users for learning about Client Presentations from SketchUp Models - using any 3rd party rendering package, or the 3D display from SketchUp itself.

Learn what is important in Client Presentations:

SketchUp Client Presentations

In this Webinar we will discuss presentation options, the use of computer generated images that can help you produce descriptive, informative, and memorable renderings of your computer models.

A good client presentation image will include be strong in several areas:

1. Geometry
2. Color
3. Textures
4. Material Finishes
5. Lighting
6. Context

We will be discussing each of these and showing examples of images which make use of them.

Register for this webinar

When: Friday June 5, 2015 at 5:00pm EDT (2:00pm PDT)

There is no charge and you will be able to participate by posting questions to the presenter.

Can you open the Ruby console before you click load and then copy and paste the contents in an email to suport@renderplus.com

Thanks,

Al

I found a different problem. I was using this code to set a string:
(This loads all text up to the word HERE into a string with new lines, etc.)

` smess = <<HERE
This face will not render in the material you have created, since it is on placed the reverse side of a face.

Use "Setup Options/Special/Process 2 Sided Faces" to allow materials on reverse faces to be rendered.
HERE`

and the beautifier indented the last line (HERE) which cause the ruby to fail

[Seems to be working ok - give it a try]

SketchUp 2014 and 2015, (ruby 1.9), changed the name of the .each function for strings.

Change line 146 or 147 to read:

source.each_line do |line|

I have also uploaded a new version into the original post.

Thanks all.

I guess my routine must have only been applying .transform! to component instances and groups, and somehow faces and edges slipped in.

I was reading a .SKP from the disk and scaling thing in different layers differently, and the disk .skp must have changed so that there was a face at the top level of entities.

Thanks.

I'll find an old version of SketchUp somewhere and see if it used to work for faces and edges one at a time.

I have some code which used to use entity.transform!(transformation)

But this no longer works for faces or edges in SU 2014 and SU 2015. I see that I should probably be using

entities.transform_entities(transform, ent1, ent2, ent3)

But, this must have worked once. Did this change in SU 2014?

@tt_su said:

@numerobis said:

But copying geometry could be improved...

Yea - we really want to improve geometry creation. The FaceFinder improvements in SU2015 was one step into that.

Multiple Threads

We, Render Plus, have written a couple of CAD Systems - and still support ARRIS Cad which is out there somewhere.

We have given a lot of thought to how to use multiple threads in a CAD system. The basic problem is that in order to use more than one thread you have to be able to do two things at once.

So, it is almost impossible to multi-thread a ruby routine which is doing something. (But not fully impossible) But somehwat easier to multi-thread time consuming operations in the C-code.

One relatively easy thing would be to improve searching the database for a particular object - because you could start 2 or 4 or more searches at once - each in its own thread looking at 1/2, 1/4 or whatever of the database - and vastly improve search times. But search times are typically such a small part of the overall CAD experience that it wouldn't help much.

But when you find a particularly slow operation like copying geometry, you might be able to multi thread it and speed it up. This is more complex because each thread is adding stuff to the database, so you have to let each thread make its changes and then clean it up afterwards. But it might be a fine challenge for some SketchUp programmers.

@andrews said:

You're looking at the wrong version of the article--for 2014 instead of 2015. Go back to that article and read the bright red warning at the top that tells you to use the dropdown menu to change to the 2015 article.

Andrew

Thanks Andrew - I had seen the warning - but still I assumed I was in the right place, since I had gotten there by clicking on the link in the SketchUp 2015 What's new article.

Reading the proper page will be much more informative!

The SketchUp description of 64 bit says: "The exception to this 32-bit status is that SketchUp for Windows has been built with an exception to allow 64-bit memory usage which allows SketchUp to use more than 4 Gb of RAM."

Just a moment...

(help.sketchup.com)

DO you think the second use of the word exception is a mistake, or do you think SketchUp found a way to create a "pseudo" 64-bit - which uses more memory, but isn't really recompiled for 64 bits?

great - that's what I was looking for anyway

I couldn't get this to work:

model = Sketchup.active_model
entities = model.active_entities
model.active_entities.erase_entities entities

I get thi error:

Error: #<TypeError: wrong argument type (expected Sketchup::Entity)>
<main>:in `erase_entities'

But I was able to get this to work: (adding .to_a which probably serves to isolate the entities array)

model = Sketchup.active_model
entities = model.active_entities
model.active_entities.erase_entities entities.to_a

@erkan said:

Hi Al,
Thanks, very interesting. Now this plugin has my attention
Is this way documented? Where can I get the specifics?

There is a lot of documentation.

Such as [anchor= goto=http://www.renderplus.com/wp2/wk/SpaceDesign_Attributes.htm:2svelgdb]Space Design Attributes[/anchor:2svelgdb]

But you will still, probably, need our help to get this set up properly.

We have a way to load prices, or other attributes, from a CSV file and then load them into you components which are then saved on the warehouse or into a library

@dan rathbun said:

@al hart said:

Thanks Dan - that works!

WHAT works ?

(I talked about at least 3 ways.)

We wound up using win32ole and RegRead

However we ran into problems with an uncaught exception when the Registry Key we passed did not exist, so we added a second rescue for the second registry key.

Like this (I added XX to the key to intentionally make it fail)

require "win32ole"

wsh = WIN32OLE.new("WScript.Shell")
begin
	val = wsh.RegRead("HKLM\\Software\\Wow6432Node\\SketchUpXX\\SketchUp 2014\\InstallLocation\\")
rescue WIN32OLERuntimeError
	val = ""
end#begin/rescue

if (val == "")
	begin
		val = wsh.RegRead("HKLM\\Software\\SketchUpXX\\SketchUp 2014\\InstallLocation\\")
	rescue WIN32OLERuntimeError
		val = ""
	end#begin/rescue
end#if

wsh.ole_free

puts "VAL; " + val