Thanks guys. Yes, I was doing a pickhelper or ray intersection and figuring out the object being clicked on and added it to the global selection. That worked fine, but only allowed selecting one entity at a time. I wanted to switch to select tool so I can use the group selection features that are available in it. Like thomthom suggested, I managed to get that working by backing up the current tool before doing Sketchup.send_action("selectSelectionTool:") and then restoring the older tool on release. This probably won't retain the tool state since I'm actually exiting the tool and re-entering, but it seems to work for my purpose.

Thanks again!

Hello,

I'm trying to temporarily switch to SU native selection tool on a key depress, do my seleections and return back to my tool on key release. From searching around, it looks like
push_tool and pop_tool might do the trick.
Dan Rathbun mentions here
that the parameter is a UI::Tool class object. Is there a way to get this value for the native selection tool?

Thanks,
Arun

Thanks TIG.

Hello,

Is there a way to grab thumbnails associated with component definitions and use them as textures without having to save them to disk?

The only option I see now is to do save_thumbnail and then import the texture which is pretty inefficient.

Thanks,
Arun

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for your replies and suggestions. Yes, I do agree that I'm twisting the application in a manner that the architecture does not intend to support. I just wanted to see if there were ways to get around the issue I am facing. I will try aborting operations to see if that does what I need.

Thanks again!
Arun

Thanks Fredo. I will try that.

Pardon my ignorance, but could you please explain what you mean by trapping? I'm able to attach a modelobserver and receive a call during transactionUndo. I assume you mean some way of prematurely exiting so the Undo would not happen, but since this is just an observer and not a subclass, I'm not sure how that could be done. Any explanation would be of great help.

Thanks again for your help
Arun

Hello All,

I have been working on adapting Sketchup to Virtual Reality displays. Since regular windows and toolbars are not visible in virtual environments, I create custom floating 3D menus (pie menus) that the user can interact with to select tools, components etc. The menus are just faces and groups with textures applied on them that show up in a particular way (Please see attached image). Since these are regular geometries, their creation also ends up becoming part of the undo stack. As a result, when I continue to undo, the menu components get erased.

Start_operation allows you to make an operation transparent, but it still is part of the stack. Is there a way to eliminate or exclude a set of operations from the undo stack? That would be of great help.

Thanks,
Arun

Hi All,

As some of you might know, I'm building an immersive version of Sketchup. Since the user would not have access to a real keyboard, I'm simulating keyboard events via 3D menus and using AutoIt to mimic the selection as a keyboard press.
This is particularly needed for things like setting the number of sides of a polygon or in making n number of copies etc.

Where I'm facing difficulty is that sometimes SU seems to lose focus on the current window. This happens on the most unexpected SU operations (setting timers or undo or commit operations), after which none of my AutoIt inputs get conveyed as keypresses. Has anyone faced a similar issue of losing focus on current window with SU calls? Also, is there a solution to the same (like directly talking to the status bar without having to mimic a keyboard press)?

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,
Arun

@sdmitch said:

Using the BoundingBox certainly works as long as the selection box is not rotated which will cause BoundingBox to be much larger than the selection box.

I see no reason why the selection process should be any slower on a curved surface. It should only matter how many total entities there are in the model.

Yea. That is the same thing I'm confused about as well. Unless SU has a way of selecting the cylindrical surface as one unit or a collection rather than add each face of the curved surface one after the other(which is what my code does). Also, all my conditionals could be slowing things down as well.

The selection box is axis aligned, so the they bounding box and the selection box should pretty much be the same size.

@dan rathbun said:

What platform is this for? PC or Mac ?

This is for the PC.