The shapes are basically 2D symbols for theatrical lighting fixtures. I have the room completely drawn in Sketchup in 3D. Unfortunately, the text labeling features of Sketchup leave a LOT to be desired therefore - Layout.

So I assume I need to use top view scenes in Layout. I guess my option is keep the fixture shapes in Sketchup and then do all of the labeling in layout which gets messy when you need to move fixtures around. The other option is for all of the fixtures and labels to be handled as a shape/group in Layout so it will be easier to move around. This second option kind of sucks in the sense that's a lot of "modeling" in the "presentation" program.

Ideally, I would love the label text to come from meta data in the Sketchup model automatically, but I don't know any way to accomplish that. I really hope Trimble will create a Ruby API for Layout that is consistent with the Sketchup API. I would love for labels to be able to execute a Ruby expression to pull the text out of the model(s) shown on the Layout page.

Any other ideas?

I've created a bunch of 2D components in Sketchup and would now like to turn them into Layout Scrapbook shapes. How do I quickly make each component an individual scrapbook shape?

If I import the drawing to layout and save as scrapbook I get one shape as the whole drawing. Having to create separate scenes for each component in Sketchup and then separate windows in layouts is extremely tedious. I'm also worried about preserving the scale throughout.

As an analogy, I'm basically want to create a scrapbook that works just like a Stencil in Visio, but if I have to do all of the steps mentioned above for each shape it would be faster to just create them in Layout directly.

Thoughts? Best Practices?

I just corrected the link in the above post. Here it is for easy reference.

http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=39846

Guys,

Thank you for the replies. Z-fighting is exactly part of the complication I was referring to.

Thanks for the style suggestion. The included toolbar picture was helpful, I honestly didn't think of that. It has me thinking about a few other toolbar changes I should make as well.

I guess I could go with the multiple faces with different colors approach as you guys mentioned. My underlying/follow-up question involved separating what something is made out of from the color or texture applied to it. I started another topic for that question linked below.

http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=39846

Hi,

What is the best practice for indicating what something is made of verses how it is colored or textured?

Examples:

A wall is covered with "drywall" that is painted some "color".
A box is made out of "20 gauge sheet metal", but painted blue.
A piece of furniture is made out of cherry wood, but coated with xyz stain.

The end goal is a standardized way of handling the material something is made from to for instance produce a Bill of Materials. And then separately be able to see how its painted to see what it will really look like. Even better would be a way of determining how much of a given color/type of paint was also needed.

Currently I see two options.

1. Assign the "made of" material to the component. Assign the color/texture to the individual faces.

2. Use Sketchup Materials strickly for painting/textures and then a custom attribute for "made of" materials.

Unfortunately #2 is non-standardized which might be problematic. Think about if this model was later going to be transferred into IFC or some other BIM tool.

What do you think is the best practice for this?

What is the best practice for painting walls? Specifically when only part of the wall has a particular color of paint on it?

For instance, image a wall in an office space that has a visible painted surface below a drop ceiling and then has an unpainted surface above the ceiling tile. The wall continues up to the hard ceiling above the drop ceiling because its plenum airspace.

I would be temped to add a flat face/group/component over the portion of the drywall that will be painted. However, I get this rendering problem in Sketchup where the GUI doesn't seem to understand which face is supposed to be on top. It shows a blended surface that shifts as the you move around the model. This is the primary problem I'm trying to get around.

Further complication it would be nice to easily hide (on/off) the painted surface. For instance I have a theater room that has a 2' black strip around the tops of all the walls and a black ceiling. Its very hard to work on the model with everything black, but when I want to do a final drawing I would like the dark colors shown.

Searching the site I found a great suggestion about using a separate material for each room/item/paint color so that you can just change the material properties and all appropriate surfaces are updated.

Suggestions?

Thanks Dave for some clarification. I'm not worried about grain at this stage. I'm just trying to get a good cut list so I can figure out how much lumber I need to purchase. I was hoping to avoid assigning to all of the faces however it wouldn't be a big deal to edit and select all before applying the material.

So next question what's the fastest way to show the board feet information. I've found in the parts object where its being stored and calculated. Do I need to change the renderers? Ideally, it would be great if there was a checklist to show/hide the extra columns such as area, volume, and board feet that are stored in the part object.

I'm doing my first serious woodworking project needing detailed cutlists by material. I already created most of the project, a baby crib, in sketchup before starting using this plugin.

I'm having problems getting the materials to work in the plug in. I've been looking at the code in parts.rb and I think I found the issue. My materials were being assigned to the component instances, but not the component definitions so I made the following change to line #215 adding line #216 as shown in parts.rb which appears to solve my problem:

        if is_component
          
          part_name = s.definition.name
          sub_parts = s.definition.entities
215          #material = s.definition.material
216          material = s.definition.material ? s.definition.material ; s.material

I still haven't been able to figure out how to apply a material to a Component Definition. Everything I've tried just applies to a specific instance. In either case I can see many scenarios where Component Instance is more useful then Component Definition. What if I was making something with identically shaped parts but with different materials for a visual effect. Example: inlayed chess board or cutting board?

I would defer to someone with more experience with this plug in. It might work better to see if an Instance material is specified first and if not default to the Definition material.

I hope this is helpful to someone.

I'm trying to create web dialogs to display component information that I would like to be able to save as an image which can then be placed into a model. The purpose is to get rich text instead of the limitations of the text box or 3D text tools.

The idea was started after pondering a suggestion of ThomThom's to use WebDialogs.

So I created a really generic html file called 'wrwtools/generictest.html':

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
	<head>
		<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
		<title>Generic HTML Test Page</title>
	</head>
	<body>
		<h1>Basic Web Dialog</h1>
		<table>
			<tr><th>&nbsp;</th><th>Value</th></tr>
			<tr><td>DMX Address</td><td>123</td></tr>
			<tr><td>Channel</td><td>101</td></tr>
			<tr><td>Fixture Number</td><td>32</td></tr>
		</table>
	</body>
</html>

Then I created a very generic test application script:

require 'sketchup.rb'

#-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
module WRW_textpanes
  # Global variable for where export images will go.
  # Global variable for where template files are stored.

  ### MENU & TOOLBARS ### --------------------------------------------------
  
  unless file_loaded?( File.basename(__FILE__) )
    root_menu = ($wrw_menu) ? $wrw_menu ; UI.menu('Plugins')
    root_menu.add_item('Web Dialog Write Test')  { self.webdialogwritetest }
  end
  
  def self.webdialogwritetest
    html_dialog = UI;;WebDialog.new("Web Dialog Test", true,"", 700, 600, 150, 150, true);
    path = Sketchup.find_support_file "wrwtools/generictest.html","Plugins"
    html_dialog.set_file path
    html_dialog.show
    
    # Simple html dialog shown now see if it will save.

     html_dialog.write_image "c;/production/sketchup/wrwtesting/shouldbewebdialog.jpg"
  end
    
end #module
#-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
file_loaded( File.basename(__FILE__) )

I was hoping shouldbewebdialog.jpg would be an image of the simple html instead I'm getting an image that is blank tan box about 300x300 in size. Its kind of like an empty messages portion of the "ruby console" dialog box.

I did have additional x,y,height,width type values after the filename, but removed them after reading this post http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=17047&start=285#p231504 but I'm still getting the same results.

I'd appreciate any help.

@thomthom said:

Bill: http://code.google.com/apis/sketchup/docs/ourdoc/webdialog.html

Hi Thomas,

I've seen a lot of good work and feedback from you on this site.

I was thinking of some HTML boxes really being shown in the sketchup interface just like a texture/photo on a face. It could be free floating though. I'm thinking of maybe 10-150 of them floating around the screen at one time depending on the zoom level of the model. Further they would be on layers that can be shown/hidden etc.... Basically think of it just like the existing text box, but with a whole lot more rich text formatting options, but not exactly 3D (like the 3D text tool).

Do you know of a good example to get started from? I've got some programming background, but I'm brand new to Ruby. I know I could make a dynamic component and then when the user clicks on it could trigger a script which shows the webdialog. However, this would not work simultaneously on multiple components. Please correct me if I'm wrong, again if you know of an example I could start from....