Topics created by August

@August said in Turtle Graphics for Sketchup:

Turtle Graphics

You would need to piggy back on the API to have implicit commands similar to Turtle-type behaviour.

In SketchUp you can use [#,#,#] to infer the [x,y,z] location in 3D space to place an object or point. But in all instances it requires user input to pick the tool and/or the first point.

I know of nothing that allow you to draw in the manner you need.

You could try @alexschreyer OpenAI extension: https://sketchucation.com/plugin/2643-as_openaiexplorer

Or @samuel_t Parametric Modelling extension: https://sketchucation.com/plugin/2387-parametric_modeling

Both have that type of capability of command based drawing. I like the latter for parametric block out.

You could use the Ruby Console to draw in the same way as you could use a chainsaw to trim your fingernails.

Try asking Claude.ai for ideas to get you a primitive example you could build on.

Hi Pixero,

That tool appears to, as it says, draw a line from the camera to the "target", the center of the camera field.

My tool, when active, draws a line from the camera through the selected point in the frame. So from a single camera position, you can draw the rays that outline an object.

Would it be straightforward to modify your tool to do that?

Thanks,
August

Photobucket have changed their system, people have to upgrade to a paid account to be able to share images now.
So as I have no interest in paying for my account any images I have uploaded to this site will appear with that message.
So it's not anything you or your new computer or even sketchucation have done, simply caused by photobucket.

Hi Dan,

Thanks for a pretty amazing exploration of the possibilities. It's both educational and entertaining (for those of us who like this kind of thing).

My apologies for dropping the ball on getting back to you. This is one of those projects that I just keep whittling away at because each step seems a little more complex than I had expected or was ready to deal with.

You provided quite an array of methods for finding the starting angle of a circle, and I'm sure some of those will be useful as I move forward.

As for my current stuck spot, I think what I'm really trying to figure out is how to specify the starting angle of a circle, a polygon, or a curve, relative to the previously placed circle or polygon, as I go around the knot placing circles.

When I use the usual tools to create a circle, the starting angle does not seem to be a parameter that is under my control. The image at the top of this thread shows where it defaults to, just using the standard circle-creating functions. I do not need to understand the logic behind those defaults, because that's not going to help me with my actual problem.

If I create a polygon, like a circle, I also do not know how to specify a starting angle.

I have to wonder, when you draw a circle or a polygon manually in SU, the point you drag out from the center becomes the starting angle. So what's going on under the hood? Is a default circle being generated and then rotated so that it's starting angle is where the cursor is?

Lacking that methodology, the only way I can see to create either a circle or a polygon where I get to specify the staring angle is to make a 360 degree curve. That feels unnecessarily limiting, but that's where I've gotten to.

My current thinking on my original problem is that I need to figure out how to place the new curve, based on the information I have from the previous circle/curve. I have the normal, which is derived from the current segment of the knot curve. I have the previous circle/curve. And I have the previous circle/curve's starting angle.

And, as you suggested, I have to deal with what the starting angle is relative to.

I have to figure out what starting angle I want to specify, based on the previous normal, the previous starting angle, and the current normal.

I think I'm going to have to nudge the starting angle of the next successive circle by just a little, so that as the sequence progresses around the knot, it does a slow rotation and comes back to the beginning. Does it want to go around only once? Or three times for the three lobes of this knot? Or what?

You gave me a great nudge that percolated for a while and now I think I know what I need to figure out for my next step. I hope that's not another year, but who knows?

Anyway, thanks for all the tips.
August

I found only these notes in the SketchUp manual about pre-processing photos:

Do not crop photos. Match Photo currently requires that the point you aimed the camera at is located in the center of the image (also called the center of projection). Although it may seem possible to use a cropped image, typically vertical lines will not align well across a cropped image and the results will be unsatisfactory. Do not warp photos. Images which have been manually warped using an image processing program, or specialized camera, are not supported by Match Photo. Remove barrel distortion or issues where straight lines are bent away from the center of the image. Barrel distortion typically occurs on wide angle lens cameras. Use a third-party product to eliminate barrel distortion from images prior to using them within Match Photo. All cameras have a little bit of this distortion and it is typically worse around the edges of the image.

Point 1 is the most repeated advice about Match Photo.

Point 2, about warped photos, would seem to me to exclude using ShiftN. I can imagine using ShiftN to apply photo textures, but I presume its distortion of the photos will make them unsuitable for Match Photo.

Point 3 is what I assume Thomthom was referring to by "lens distortion". This lens appears to be excellent in that respect. It is extremely hard to find any evidence of barrel distortion.

But, as I reported earlier, I appear to have non-square pixels, the images as displayed are all a bit narrower than the model.

If anyone has any experience with how to accurately test that aspect of a camera lens, I would appreciate any suggestions. I will probably be working out my own tests this coming weekend.

I presume I will need a way to accurately identify the position of the center of the lens while the camera is on a tripod pointed at a flat surface that is exactly perpendicular to the camera's line of sight.

Theory is easy. Construction still awaits a design.

A brute-force approach would be to simply try different values for the adjustment until I find one that seems pretty good. But since it can take up to an hour of fussing and fiddling to reach what I consider my best compromise, that approach is guaranteed to take a few hours.

Again, brilliant ideas are always welcome.

Thanks,
August

I suspect that the four-letter anagram was somewhat intentional.

Many people see it right away and the anagram is NEVER used on their web site.

Had me going there for a while until I read more. Pretty convincing video though 👍

post removed. (Too tired, low confidence in what I wrote.)

Thanks August. I've had situations in the past where I really needed to figure out a font in an image, so I'll be sure to bookmark these! 👍

The 2D Tools set is available in the Plugins forum here do a search for it and by author 'TIG'...
I could give you a direct link but it's good that you learn to find things yourself - 'give a man a fish or teach a man to fish' etc...

@august said:

Sorry for the sarcasm.

I should have remembered a rule from one of my college professors, Gregory Bateson, "Never an untrue word spoken in jest." Can still allow sarcasm, just not hyperbole.

Thanks for the enthusiasm Rocky,

@xrok1 said:

... c'mon people, i'm pullin my hair out here. ...
but dont' hurt yourself over it.

I woundn't even be thinking about it as a possibility if all these other wonderful tools hadn't set my expectations so high. 😄

And I'm certainly not the programmer to do it myself.

I have not tried "TIG's extrusion toolset" but your phrasing suggests it's another one that does not quite go this far.

I'm just trying to work out a design idea. I have manual ways to try it out in rough form. If I get hooked on one that takes some tedium to execute in finer detail, I'll just put on some music and get into a "Tower of Hanoi" rhythm.

It looks from the PhotoShop screen shot like Adobe calls that particular morph "Fisheye". I had thought about using that term myself, but I didn't because I thought it would unnecessarily predispose people to thinking in terms of 2D-like solutions.

I like your notion of "Shape Bender on steroids". SB is still at Beta 0.55, so I might imagine this for SB 2.0. Where SB 0.55 has a single Guide line and single Target Curve, I could see SB 2.0 allowing two or four (or N?) matching Guide Lines and Target Curves. (1. Select Source Group. 2. Activate SB. 3. Select single lines or group of N lines. 4. Select Target Curve or group of N Target Curves. -- How do you specify the order of the lines and the Target Curves? Like most such development projects, if you can design a UI that lets the user intuitively and unambiguously specify their intent, you're part way there.)

That would be a lot like being able to apply SB or FredoScale to the guide points of SFFD. From a programming standpoint, extending SB to multiple Guide Lines seems like a smaller conceptual jump than extending FS to be able to move SFFD's guide points, but maybe "all" it would take is getting FS to handle nested groups. Maybe extending SFFD to align guide points to a target curve, like SB, would be the easiest of all.

But of course, I don't know the internals of any of these, nor how much interest any of these developers has in going out into the ionosphere here. Comparing relative "ease" of these tasks is irrelevant when there are three different volunteers involved. (I can see it now, this year's Ruby extension challenge, submissions due 12/31. 😉 )

Thanks again for jumping in, Rocky. At least I know I'm not missing the obvious (as I too often do).

August

http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=179&t=27509

Kinda late but still good.

My ideas was do create a Fence-Builder where you can plan fences for your garden.
So you could be able to snap the fences vertically and horizontally. Add doors and so on.

Thats what snap alignment would be great for.

been a bit distracted myself, let me know how get on, maybe we can put together a package for the community at large

john

Neat stuff. I'd like to be able to export some of that to Kerkythea and play with it there.

Hi August, the admin's have not mentioned it, but the tutorial section is undergoing a major update. All tutorials have been offline for a few days, and now they are coming back online, but they are all being processed into a new format by hand, which will take some time. But the idea that the new format wiil be significantly easier for the authors to use (thus hopefully equalling more tutorials being made).

So I too am seeing the messed up code. I am guessing that it will all get fixed in a few days.

Try checking tutorials.sketchucation.com for the newly adapted tutorials (though I don't know if any are migrated to the new site yet). But keep checking there for the newly adapted tutorials,

Chris

PS Glad to know you were trying to look at my tutorial 😄 I have plans for more to come!

Hows this? Select the capture method, dig the window, and save to file.

temp.jpg