@tig said:

You misunderstand...
Make two scenes [what are these 'layers-sets' to which you refer? - ???]
Set the date for both scene-tabs.
One scene-tab needs to be set with the shadows at 0900hrs and the other set at 1800hrs.
Make an animation [as jpg files] with the number of scenes needed between he two scene extremities.
Repeat for another 'date' as desired...
A script is not that necessary...

Well, a given sun study file would have 16 tabs - March 21/June 21, 900,1800 each (4 ) x 4 layer settings. wouldn't the animations be transitioning between, say, March 21 1800 Layer A and March 21 0900 Layer B? Then there's the renaming of every file once it's out so that it is easy to run my photoshop script, which would have to be done kinda manually. I will look into it, but I'm skeptical and I think a script would offer everything in one shot - when we're talking about developing a strategy that can be applied fairly easily to all of the computers in the office, it's the kind of thing that would really benefit from a solves-all script

Hi all,

I'm an intermediate sketchup user and have done my share of script programming over the years, whether for Revit, Autocad, ArchiCAD, Photoshop or whatever. The thought of learning Ruby is a bit daunting at this point as I'm an architect and have to focus on making buildings!

So here's my problem. I do buildings that often require sun studies, and the City where I live has standards for them - 2 days of the year (March 21, June 21) taken at hourly intervals from 9am to 6pm. I have written a set of scripts and actions for Photoshop that automates the process of layering my images from Sketchup to generate shadow boundaries... we often have to overlay a "built to the word of the by-law" shadow on top of our "proposed building" shadow and I have developed a technique+action to do this easily. However, exporting each image one by one, for each hour of the day, for 4 different layer states sure takes a long time. If I get in the groove, it takes half an hour to do all 80 images... but I have better things to do, as do others in my office And after looking into using the Animation technique to export, it doesn't look like it will work for me.

So what do I need out of the Ruby script? Export a Scene X times, on hourly intervals from a specified start point, into a directory with a naming scheme that indicates date, time, and layer setting (currently it's MMDD_0900_SCENE.jpg, MMDD_1000_SCENE.jpg, etc where SCENE would be the name of the scene tab). I'm hoping that there is a plugin out there that already does something like this, or that I can frankenstein one together out of a couple that already exist... but I'm really new to the world of SU plugins. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Or point me to a tutorial or two that have examples of how I would write the script for this? Or does anyone want to do it out of the kindness of their heart? hehe

Anyway, thanks for reading!

@tig said:

Export an animation - BUT choose to export it as a set of 'image files'.
If you set each start/end scene-tab to the required shadow/sun settings, and then choose a suitable number of 'steps' in the animation, the intermediate images that are generated will the the 'hourly' ones... If you have more than a 'pair' of tabs you'll need to either split the model or ignore the unneeded transitions...

Hmmmm... that sounds annoying, haha! For each day (March 21, June 21) I have the 4 views (same view for all, different layer settings). so that means I have to make 8 different files... and if I have to change the model I have to re-save them alllll... now if I could xref the model into each - IE a "skeleton" file containing two views for each time of year/layer setting, that would work... but i don't think that's possible

How hard would it be (or is it even possible?) to create a ruby script?

Hi everyone,

As part of my regular workflow, I set up 4 views and need to export them as JPGs for each hour of the day - starting at 9am and going to 6pm, for two days of the year. At 10 images per view for each day, that's 80 images and a lot to do by hand.

What would be the best way to have Sketchup do this automatically - would a ruby script be fairly easy to write? Or is there already a plugin I could use, or would it mean finding a sneaky way of using the animation tool?

Thanks for your help!