Didier Bur's "Component Spray" is very similar to Advanced Painter:

http://rhin.crai.archi.fr/rld/plugin_details.php?id=76

i'm using cs5 and don't see .skp available - however, .dae, .kmz, .3ds, and .obj are, so it shouldn't be too complicated to export and import back, right?

component comparison and matt666's component/groups plugin should do the trick without altering component axes. see my previous post on converting xfrog leaves:

http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=30143&hilit=component+comparison&start=15

@unknownuser said:

the [xfrog] leaves are identical geometry - just a simple rectangle. at least with the models i have. i converted the leaves of a young birch to identical components with matt666's component/groups plugin:

http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=17590

it is quite slow, the plugin and the process - took me several hours: select 200-300 leaves at a time, select faces only with thomthom's selection tools, use matt666's plug to convert entities to components, and then run component comp to make them all the same. don't explode the leaf groups until you've converted them all to components, then it takes only seconds.

thank you so much TIG! this is a blessing. i can't tell you how many times i've downloaded models from the 3d warehouse which seem to exponentially multiply the list of materials already in my model.

hmmm... never seen one besides 1001 bit...

great great great idea! thank you, tig.

embarrassingly, i haven't used simplify curves yet, i just knew it existed... but if it welds & simplifies curves, then it's a real work of genius! if it works with all contours at once, then it appears haynesc's problem is solved.

i use that same workflow, and it's frustrating and time consuming, i agree. if there is a way to combine weld and thomthom's 'simplify curve' function from his 'edge tools' script that would be awesome.

my only worry is that it would overload SU most times. I have enough trouble making terrain 'from contours' - it will often take hours if it works at all. similarly, welding a long contour line has caused SU to crash on me - i can't imagine what welding 100s of contour lines would do. i do work on an urban/neighborhood scale though, so perhaps on a site-scale things would be less troublesome.

+1 on the request for a plugin of this nature - but forget the business with endpoints.

is there a way to select a number of line segments and simply multiply or subdivide them to smooth out a spline/curve imported from CAD? ie. i have a spline that comes in to SU with 24 segments, exploded. by selecting them, the script might 1. weld and 2. allow for increased segments similar to the native SU function for arcs/circles/polygons in 'entity info.' ??

the leaves are identical geometry - just a simple rectangle. at least with the models i have. i converted the leaves of a young birch to identical components with matt666's component/groups plugin: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=17590
it is quite slow, the plugin and the process - took me several hours: select 200-300 leaves at a time, select faces only with thomthom's selection tools, use matt666's plug to convert entities to components, and then run component comp to make them all the same. don't explode the leaf groups until you've converted them all to components, then it takes only seconds.

@dave r said:

Wood three points be alright?

ha! i can see where your mind is...

well, great news. i imported an xfrog 3ds young birch tree and after quite some time spent converting raw geometry to components, i have made every leaf the same component. your plugin worked extremely fast despite there being about 8000 leaf component instances. for whatever reason, it missed several hundred unique leaf comps, but identifying them in outliner and running the comp comparison in two smaller batches resolved the issue.

i was also unable to run the comparison on leaf components nested in the 'sub-groups' that are default with xfrog trees. exploding the groups and using free comps, worked as expected though.

tried to convert branch and root components to the same, but no luck. the branches appear visually to have the same structure, but even with a tolerance of 500" no luck. they are quite complex meshes as you know.

pre-comparison SKP file was 102Mb. post-comparison SKP file is 45.7Mb, 8048 comp instances, 11 comp definitions. amazing!

THANK YOU, thomthom.

@thomthom said:

hmmm... weren't X-Frog leaves groups in chunks? Need to group each individual leaf in order to run a comparison I think...

a relatively slow process, but definitely doable thanks to your previous plugins! - select all faces within large groups, convert faces to individual groups, explode large groups and then... component comparison. will be nice to be able to change materials or dare i say, subdivide and bend leaves a bit...

fantastic, thomthom! this will be perfect for that pesky issue of turning xfrog leaves into a single component! looking forward to it.

thanks for the tip, thomthom. i see solo proposed the idea in your component dropper thread. i am experimenting with it on a few trees. it actually makes the workflow quite a bit faster and easier, but does not keep geometry in the exact original orientation.

thus, i'm creating components of each leaf (painfully slow), using component dropper to make them all the same (instantaneous, even for thousands of leaves), and then using chris fullmer's scale and rotate multiple to give them a little bit of randomness. i'll show you a tree with some stats when finished - it's slow, but i think will yield a more natural chaotic result than the original trees - xfrog tends to be too fractal and perfect in my opinion.

a note however, your 'groups to components' works almost instantly, whereas the same function with matts plugin took several minutes. perhaps at some point this script could be updated to work on non-group entities as matts does, but with more efficiency.

i'm looking for a method to simplify an xfrog tree using perhaps this plugin, or matt's, but i'm running into problems with the component axes.

the idea is:

1. make each leaf (1.5"x1" rectangles) into a component.

2. in the component window, i replace the selected unique leaf components with a single leaf component.

the glitch comes with the fact that each leaf is tilted to a different angle, but component creation scripts seem to set the axes identical to that of the world axes (see pics below). thus when i replace the selected components with one single component they all end up angled to the exact same direction. so is there a way that i can do this and maintain the orientation of each individual component? ie. can an option be included in this script to set all component axes exactly the same relative to each 'unique' component?

good if axes of each leaf is the same, maybe here:

bad if axes of each leaf component is different relative to comp.:

thanks!

i use a plugin that should work - i believe it is thomthom's selection toys - http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=14975 . i can't remember exactly though, it may be another selection script.

if your leaves have a separate material applied, you can right click > select > same material. you will select all the leaf faces, and then if necessary, you should also be able to use the script again to select all lines forming the leaf faces.

wow. that sounds much better than my method.

in the past, i've taken 100s of 2d contours, double clicked each polyline, and then grouped each one. after that, i set the distance between lines on "Mover2" and just clicked the groups the number of times appropriate to raise each line...

oh yeah, not to mention, i had drawn each individual line from the terrain view of googlemaps with a wacom tablet and the pencil tool in illustrator.

probably the dumbest thing i've ever done. but i got a nice terrain model from it! ha.

oh yeah, and we didn't even end up using the terrain model for the final product.

try this one:

(www.smustard.com)

@unknownuser said:

I am completely unable to install Ruby Scripts on my Macbook. (Apple, you suck!) ... Wish I was on my PC

hmmm... thousands of other people use SU plugins daily on their Macs... is it really Apple that sucks here?