Hi, I can see RpWallMaker being useful, though I would like to see the following changes: Place the wall offset from the drawn line, rather than making the drawn line the centre line of the wall (or have the option of offsetting at least). This would enable working with imported dwg. files and actual internal or external dimensions. The hole insertion point would be easier to use if located on the top corner of the rectangle. Lintels over openings often align even if openings are of differing heights. If openings were sub components of the wall, they would be easier to select and then move when the wall is exploded or edited.

@caddict said: Look forward to trying out that add-on! I often build the basic house structure in a cad app, simply because it's easier to build walls, make openings, etc...then move it over to SU. It's ready to try - See: RpWallMaker

@jim said: I know it barfs when the file is encrypted. We've asked Google to fix this, but no dice yet. Ditto on Ruby access to Dimension objects.

@mike lucey said: 1,000,000 businesses x $50 a shot, hey! that $50,000,000 Okay, now that it's revealed, the cannot blame the crisis for having to postpone 3D BaseCamp in Europe any more!

Dallas at moment, and Boston from July if that helps.

Hey Al. I was hoping I could post again before you saw my terse update. I was going to expand on my post to give you the info you are asking for now. Right now, I zip everything up into a single file. Doing this on Windows works fine for Macs. I haven't done the reverse, but I suspect it would work fine too. After reading the first hit on the link I posted, creating the .dmg seems pretty straight forward. However, I want to go a step further from that for now on, and actually create an installer app as part of the .dmg. I'm now researching what it would take to do this. I would be happy to share it with you when I am done (as long as you don't mind a "powered by Smustard.com" label at the bottom of the dialog... Todd

@unknownuser said: I don't know if i am on target with your question but the new Smustard profile builder and the dynamic component feature seem to give that sort of function. Dynamic components can be useful for stretchable components. For instance if you want to make an arbitrary length piping run with 20 foot pipe sections, and fittings between settings, then you can do the whole thing with one component. But you still have to place the component in the first place and stretch it to the desired size, and if your fittings have an inside (e.g. connection to wall) then you also have to align the component properly depending on whether you are placing in on the inside or outside of a wll. I'll have to take a look at profile builder and see what it does.

Using sketchUp add-on to place furniture looks nice. It will makes work easy and faster.

[Later Edit] I must have been dreaming when I thought this worked for me. Now it is broken again. I went into the ATI Catalyst Control Center - to 3D / Standard settings and moved the Performance/Quality slider one to the right, from Balanced to High Quality. (It was not easy to figure out which setting to change, and the ATI help system offered no help) Then the SketchUp Bug Splats stopped and LightUp also works! [image: 3Y9p_bug-splat.JPG]

I generally use jpg for textures...like stone or wood grain. These are effectively photos; and jpg is a reasonable format for "busy" images like that, as most artifacting is lost in the detail. It needs to be at compression level 7 at the very least. I only use jpg in these instances because it generally leads to a lower file size...especially when many such images might be embedded in a skp file. If I was using an image with lot of flat colour...especially one with leaves against a flat background, as in Al's example, I'd definitely go for png. Not only will it give a cleaner image with no loss of detail, but on a limited colour palette (especially items like logos or shop signage) it will likely also be a smaller file size than a jpg (even a jpg saved at level 7). Both png and tiff can result in surprisingly small file sizes when used for graphic images like signs or logos. In fact I've made very large B/W (black and white) tiffs and pngs which have barely made it into double figures of kilobytes when saved out of PS with LZW compression. This png...saved from a vector image I'm working on had to be reduced to fit the forum limits. However it was exported from corel at full A4 size (that's over 3000 pixels high...with all the resulting sharpness of detail) and was an amazingly small 18k in size. The tiff was larger, but even that was only 69k...2/3 the size of the equivalent level 7 jpg. [image: IogY_clubbing..png]

@al hart said: @unknownuser said: ...As an aside - Is anyone aware of a good way to develop applications for Windows and Mac at the same time? Does the Mircosoft .NET tool do this, or is there some other tool we should use? afaik .NET is Windows only very common in this area is Qt from Nokia (formerly Trolltech) hth, Norbert

Al, thank you for that. I had no idea. My condolences to his family.

I arrived a little late to this thread: I notice the discussion has meandered, which is normal, in forums. For those reading this thread, I have already donated 2 Ruby scripts to this forum which I wrote: I didn't claim copyright nor did I obfuscate the code so others could not read it, and anyone is free to use the code and alter it. Window Tools: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=14394&p=109705&hilit=window+tools#p108868 Door Tool: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=14008&p=105538&hilit=doortools#p105538 My investigation into Ruby coding lead me to believe that it was impossible to cut an opening into a wall, because a SketchUp wall is not actually a wall, its only to planes separated by a given distance, with 4 more planes defining the thickness, unlike a real 3d object which would require a Boolean operation to cut holes into it, or Nurb objects. However my 2 ruby scripts will cut openings into walls as long as the user enters the wall thickness into the dialog box prior to cutting the holes. SketchUp is a surface modeling program NOT a solid modeling program like ArchiCad, Maya, XIS, Max, C4D, or Rhino. Its also one of the main problems facing developers trying to produce workable export plugins from SketchUp to other 3d platforms. I found schedules the 3rd item on the list, to which not much attention has been paid. When I was creating AutoCad window and Door schedules many years ago, I could get them to print out via an Excel spreadsheet. So they could be incorporated in 8.5x 11 format into the back of a specification manual(s) I had to create a Dialog box consisting of some 15 attribute tags that needed to by filled out before a door could be inserted onto a AutoCad drawing file. So whats wrong with that! Nothing except AutoCad would change its menu structure each year. And with each newer version, it became impossible to keep up making changes to the menu structure, and to incorporate those Attribute and Lisp coded functions. And it got even harder, for the Firm, after I left. I heard later that they were making schedules the old fashioned way, which was much faster in the long run. I've been there just like Atl-Arch describing his attempt to build a stone cap parapet. I recall Working with a $3000.00 program from AutoDesk called Architectural Desktop, which was supposed to be used to draw repetitive floor plans, except they forgot to include an actual floor in the program that you could insert and which had actual thickness. I hope Revit users wont go through the same dilemma, now that AutoDesk bought them. Regardless, I'm looking forward to the schedule, good luck, Al

@kwistenbiebel said: Colours of the trees are odd though. That is why I asked you earlier on to have the option to produce 3D trees rather than billboards, so we can alter the textures of bark and leaves ourselves. I love the plugin you made, but I can't use it currently in my renders as there is not a lot of control on the textures. Having 3D trees with seperate textures would allow that... You can change the colours of the bark and leaves before you create the tree. They are alpha-png images stored in the application. You can load them, change them, and save them with a new name (or save other images) and make the trees with the new images. See: http://wiki.renderplus.com/?title=Rptreemaker#Can_you_change_color.3F_If_so.2C_how.3F_This_would_be_very_important.Changing color [image: Yellow-leaf.jpg] You can also change the brightness of the trees with the Brightness tab before you save the image. You can also, vary the illumination of the tree by rotating the HDRi sky which illuminates it on the Advanced tab. All that said, we do intend to produce a 3D version. But we haven't gotten around to it yet.

@wikii said: Thank you very much for the info, AI! Is it possible to show me a little demo rb_file about how to use RpTools.dll to load a dcl file? Pardon me,if you feel my request is unreasonable,for I want to know more about it eagerly. I put some samples on the Render Plus Forum if you want to try some things out:

Startup works now for me. Thanks! Great tool.

FF is the only serious choice, of course. There's some rendered examples of FF content here and here. There is another free resource at http://www.archibase.net/ but the quality is very variable and the ads are intensely annoying. It's mainly gdl stuff but they do tend to have 3ds versions. OK if you're not worried about poly count or reversed faces.

Some people have been having problems running the Tree Editor, either from SketchUp, or directly from the disk. We now have it creating a debug file as it loads. If you have been having this problem: Download the latest version from: Downloads Start the Tree Editor. If the tree editor fails, go to the RpTreeMaker menu under windows and select Show debug file. Send us the content of the debug file so we can determine where it failed.