@solo said:

I can only dream.

However then we may get into the problem of Rendering as I would think that such abilities would create millions of unique textures.

One "trick" a supplier of textured objects uses is to create a single texture with the 1,000's of small sub-textures in it, and then position the textures cleverly to the individual faces. This could easily be done here as well. (You just need one texture - the painted image - and then map it to the original faces so that it looks the same in the one particular view.)

Similarly, it the object already has a texture, wrapped around various surfaces, then you can distort the 3D painted image onto the original texture. With a little work you could superimpose only the changed pixels onto the original texture.

Does PhotoMatch, or 3D street view, or whatever, already wrap an image onto surfaces, or multiple faces to keep the same appearance?

Its a minor difference, but I was planning to "distort" the texture as I loaded it into he editor to match the current 3D view, and then "un-distort" the texture as I put it back.

Then, If you added a circle in the 3D view to the texture, it would remain a circle in the same view in SketchUp.

Or if you added patterned strokes, they would retain the same pattern.

But it sounds more like Richcat was hoping to draw in paint, on the 3D image, and then apply the changes to each sub-surface (creating a new texture for each sub-surface)

@thomthom said:

@al hart said:

2. Export the face, with its existing texture, in 3D view, into a paint program and paint on it.

Wouldn't this pretty much be similar to Make Unique Texture and then Edit Texture Image... ?
As long as you're talking about single flat surfaces.

I have both SketchUp 7 and SketchUp 8 on my Windows toolbar - but they have the same icon.

Has anyone created a good icon I could use for SU 8, to differentiate it from SU 7?

I could easily change the icon on the toolbar, but do they still have programs which change the icon in the .EXE?

Has anyone every created, or wanted, this feature:

The ability to export a face with texture into a paint program, paint on the existing texture, and then reload it back into SketchUp.

1. Select a face in a 3D view.

2. Export the face, with its existing texture, in 3D view, into a paint program and paint on it.

3. Resave it, and reload into SketchUp as a new texture, positioned properly on the face:

In this sample, the face was painted from the already shaded texture in SketchUp. With a little work, you could paint on the original material instead, so that, when reloaded it could be loaded into SketchUp and reshaded.

Has anyone created a ruby to do this already?

Is anyone doing this already by hand?

Would this be a useful feature?
(If I make it, I would probably add it to NprTools)

It would be relatively easy to do this for a single, flat, face. It would be much harder to do it for a curved surface, as in this example where the blue painted part would have to be placed on several surfaces and on curved surfaces.

Al

By "waiting", I meant that maybe someone already had a web dialog which did this and would upload it...

(I can always hope! )

@dan rathbun said:

Don't bother waiting.. you cannot use a messagebox. They are modal (and Ruby stops until they are closed.)

Choice is a WebDialog, or if Win32 only, you can use Win32 API calls to create you own non-modal window.

@thomthom said:

Should be doable with a webdialog - since you then have methods to open and close those windows.

Thanks,

I'll have to try a web dialog, but I will wait a few hours to see if anyone already has one.

Start and stop timer did not work as well as I had hoped:

def temp_message
	$bdisp = true
	$id1 = UI.start_timer(1, false) {
		puts "A;" + $bdisp.to_s
		if $bdisp
			$bdisp = false
			puts "B;" + $bdisp.to_s
			UI.messagebox("test3" )
		end#if
		}
	$id2 = UI.start_timer(2, false) {
		puts "STOP"
		UI.stop_timer($id1)
		}
end#def

I would like to load an informative message box, but take it down after a couple of seconds - without haging to wait for the user to click OK.

I am going to see if I can do this with a timer, killing the timer thread.

Has anyone done this already?

I'm sorry to see that you had a problem with SpaceDesign.

If you would like to pursue it further, send your .SKP file to support@renderplus.com and I will see what went wrong.

Al

Take a look a SpaceDesign.

This is a robust report generator for SketchUp.

It is not free, but is very powerful - calculating extended costs, weights, areas, volumes, etc., drilling into sub-components, filtering our unwanted components and producing a report.

It is not correct to use a realistic image of a stone or brick wall to create bump maps or displacement maps, but many people do it just to get a different look.

Check out this page on the SketchUp Sage site: Bump Maps

True Bump Maps

Sample of "true" bump map rendered to create a stone effect:

This is the "bump map image" used to create this effect:

Bump Map from color image

Here are two images. The second uses the first image as an "not technically correct" bump map:

We have started a CrowdSpring project to design a new header for the Render Plus IRendernXt.com site.

This new site is working out well. However, I designed the header rather quickly when I set it up. And I am probably a better programmer than graphics designer.

Check out: CrowdSpring Project and submit some if proposals if you like.

Personally, I think CrowdSpring is an unfair platform for designers - since they only win one of every 10 or 20 designs submitted - so it is a lot of work for not much money.

But it is a good deal for people like us who get good quality work for not much money. And, for designers with a "day job", (who can earn extra money at night on CrowdSpring, but can't earn more money by working harder at their ":day job") it might be a good idea.

Have any of the "Reverse Engineering" Gurus out there found a SendMessage() value to save or restore toolbar positions?

And/Or has anyone found where and how these positions and other toolbar stuff are saved in the registry?

@dan rathbun said:

... and Al, I do not get that float range error when running SU8 with Ruby v 1.8.7-p299

~

The error is elusive, so it may be occurring when you run another script, but you can't see it.

How do you change the ruby version used internally by SketchUp?

@thomthom said:

The new core is more strict - the warning is probably because 0.1 suffers from rounding errors.

i suspect it is because you can't set a timer to less that a full second.

I get the same error with 0.5, which shouldn't have any rounding errors:

UI.start_timer(0.5, false) {puts "A" }
(eval): warning: Float 0.5 out of range
20984
A

The message is even stranger when you pass if 2.0/10.0

UI.start_timer(2.0/10.0, false) {puts "A" }
(eval): warning: Float 2.0 out of range
20928
A

This thread is related to a similar thread in the developers section:

http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=30652

However, I am seeking some help from non-developers.

Question:

Does anyone had a .rb ruby plugin which they load manually from the ruby console, or manually from the plugins menu, after SketchUp has loaded, which then places a toolbar in the SketchUp toolbar area which is properly docked.

We are having a problem where our toolbars which are loaded after SketchUp has started always load un-docked.

When we place the .rb in the plugins folder and load it with SketchUp the toolbars dock properly.

The timer did not help.

Thanks for the idea, Dan.

It is interesting that I get a warning when starting the timer:

/aa/toolbar.rb:32: warning: Float 0.1 out of range

SU 7 does not give the warning.

Has anyone tried my code (You do not actually need any .PNG files) and/or does anyone have a small .rb which I can load from a directory, rather than putting in plugins to see what it does?

Latest code:

 toolbar = UI;;Toolbar.new "Test2"
 # This toolbar icon simply displays TestX on the screen
 cmd = UI;;Command.new("Test2") { 
   UI.messagebox "Test2"
 }
 cmd.small_icon = "ToolPencilSmall.png"
 cmd.large_icon = "ToolPencilLarge.png"
 cmd.tooltip = "Test Toolbars"
 cmd.status_bar_text = "Testing the toolbars class"
 cmd.menu_text = "Test2"
 toolbar = toolbar.add_item cmd

 cmd = UI;;Command.new("Test3") { 
   UI.messagebox "Test3"
 }
 cmd.small_icon = "ToolPencilSmall.png"
 cmd.large_icon = "ToolPencilLarge.png"
 cmd.tooltip = "Test Toolbars"
 cmd.status_bar_text = "Testing the toolbars class"
 cmd.menu_text = "Test3"
 toolbar = toolbar.add_item cmd
 toolbar.show

  # Show toolbar if it was open when we shutdown.
  state = toolbar.get_last_state
printf("toolar state; %s\n", state)
  if (state == TB_VISIBLE)
    toolbar.restore
    # Per bug 2902434, adding a timer call to restore the toolbar. This
    # fixes a toolbar resizing regression on PC as the restore() call
    # does not seem to work as the script is first loading.
printf("Starting timer\n")
    UI.start_timer(0.1, false) {
      toolbar.restore
    }
printf("After Starting timer\n")
  end

Result in SU 8:

load '/aa/toolbar.rb'
/aa/toolbar.rb:33: warning: Float 0.1 out of range
toolar state: 1
Starting timer
After Starting timer
true

Is there a place to report bugs such as this?

And/or are they worth reporting?

I suspect I would have gotten a better response if I had discovered the bug and reported it during Bets testing.

Our problem here is that we like to let the user choose and load one of 4 toolbars for our rendering product - depending on which one they want to run - so it is tricky to load the toolbar while SketchUp is loading, (which seems to avoid the problems), but rather to let the user choose which toolbar to load from the plugins menu.

@thomthom said:

@al hart said:

We are having some problems with toolbars in SU8. We load a toolbar, but we can't seem to get it to load docked (It loads OK - but always undocked).

By design - a method to avoid the toolbar shuffle as new toolbars that inserted them selves docked to a toolbar would throw everything else around.

Thanks for helping with this ThomThom.

That would make sense the first time we loaded the new toolbar, but if the user docked it and exited SketchUp, then the user would hope it reloaded into the same place the next time he/she ran SketchUp.

Also, the .rb file in the plugins folder did load into the docked area the first time. Only the .rb file loaded after starting SketchUp always loads undocked.

We're going to release our SU 8 versions with this bug as is.

We will try registering the application properly as an Extension and see if that helps. (We have not done that yet).

We are running around in circles this morning, because a "bug fix" in Ruby 1.8.6 made it an error to convert a 32-bit number (such as the SketchUp color white) into a signed integer. It can only be converted into an unsigned integer. So we are recompiling and testing everything for SU 8.

Toolbar problem in SU 8 on Windows

We are having some problems with toolbars in SU8. We load a toolbar, but we can't seem to get it to load docked (It loads OK - but always undocked).

To test it, I placed this code in a files called toolbar.rb, not in my plugins folder. (In a folder called c:\aa"

 toolbar = UI;;Toolbar.new "Test2"
 # This toolbar icon simply displays Hello World on the screen
 cmd = UI;;Command.new("Test2") { 
   UI.messagebox "Test2"
 }
 cmd.small_icon = "ToolPencilSmall.png"
 cmd.large_icon = "ToolPencilLarge.png"
 cmd.tooltip = "Test Toolbars"
 cmd.status_bar_text = "Testing the toolbars class"
 cmd.menu_text = "Test2"
 toolbar = toolbar.add_item cmd
 toolbar.show

When I start SU 8, and load this .rb file: load('w:/aa/toolbar.rb')

The toolbar appears, but it is undocked.

I dock it, and exit SketchUp, restart SketchUp and reload it and it still appears undocked.

Does anyone have any ideas?

1. I removed all .rb files from my plugins folder and it still doesn't work.

2. I placed similar code in a .rb file in the plugins folder and it does load properly - docked.

3 I tried docking it in different places, and it still won't come up docked.

4. This sample, from the SU API documentation references icons which don't exist. I also tried it with icons which do exist and it didn't help.

5. In SU 7 - it comes up docked the first time and every time,

Any ideas?

Note: We only seem to have this problem when loading a tool bar with a command, not if loaded when SketchUp first starts.

Could this be related to the new SU 8 feature to remember toolbar docking locations?

toolbar.rb