Posts made by cdubea

Newbie question from not so newbie.

Is there a way to dimension an angle in SketchUp?

thanks

chris

@watkins said:

Dear Chris,

Thanks for the explanation. I too came from the drawing board world, and then AutoCAD, but for some reason it took me ages to get used to 3D modelling (something about how my brain works). Even now I only use a fraction of Inventor's capabilities. For me Sketchup has replaced both the drawing board and 2D layouts in AutoCAD. I now go straight to Sketchup. I have been pleased to find that I can export from Inventor (as a .sat file) and then import into Sketchup via AutoCAD (after scaling up by x 100 inside AutoCAD). As yet I have not found a way to import Sketchup files into Inventor.

Did you see my thread textures post? You might find the textures useful (they are in the Materials and Styles section). I have attached part of an assembly I'm working on as an example of how I use Sketchup.

I've been doing solid modeling since the mid 90's and my experience is generally the more capable a designer is with AutoCAD the longer it takes to really embrace the power of designing in 3D. In the past it was always the 'young bucks' who came quickly up to speed while the grizzled veterans often times really struggled to get their heads around it.

That's a very impressive model. The discipline you learned in Inventor shows in the model. I'm amazed at how haphazardly some models are assembled. Have you created a fastener library? What I see as a major drawback of SketchUp is the lack of technical quality hardware models. Saying that though, we certainly created a lot of our own in the early days of Pro-E and SolidWorks.

Have a look at the stl exporter from Didier Bur in the Ruby section. I use it to export models into SolidWorks, but I don't know if Inventor supports stl file import or not. SolidWorks certainly doesn't do it very elegantly.

chris

@watkins said:

Dear Chris,

I am curious to know how you use Sketchup. I use AutoCAD's Inventor as it has all the bells and whistles, but I also use Sketchup for quick modelling and for sorting through ideas. I find that designing first in Sketchup makes using Inventor easier and my final models are better structured and have fewer steps in the modelling browser.

Regards,
Bob

Hi Bob,

Well, I'm an old school kind of guy and I normally use pencil and paper to get a feel for a design before I jump into a modeller.

At this stage, I generally use SolidWorks for professional design of mechanical equipment as it has all the tools to deal with the myriad of issues present in any complicated design. My SketchUp usage is generally for personal projects such as the layout for my recent kitchen remodel, my woodworking projects, etc. I'm in the process of migrating my SolidWorks woodworking projects into SketchUp. SketchUp is just a much more comfortable tool for woodworking than SolidWorks.

Saying that, I've been using the xref ruby to maintain a bit of associativity between parts and assemblies in SketchUp. The downside is the xref utility doesn't differentiate between top level parts and those deeper down the assembly tree. Any xref'd item shows up in the top assembly. As you might imagine this becomes quite cumbersome. Once I get a little free time, I'm going to rewrite the xref ruby to allow a more logical part/assembly handling mechanism, not unlike those in SolidWorks, Inventor, etc, etc....

good luck

chris

Negative. You can use references to other parts in construction, but they have no history.

I'm a long term SolidWorks user and honestly, I don't miss it. Flip flopping between applications can be problematic because of different hotkeys and such.

@maverick83 said:

Hi all
The title says it all... I haven't figured out how i can import a 3D solidWorks design in SU... Is it possible? Do I need a third party software to achieve my goal?
Thanks a lot!!

p.s. i can save SolidWorks designs in these file format (i don't mention photograph format like .jpg ecc..):
.prt
.cgr
.xaml
.3dxml
.u3d
.eprt
.stl
.wrl
.vda
.sat
.step
.igs
.x_b
.x_t
.sldftp
.prtdot
.sldprt

Save to an acis file. Open DWGEditor. Import ACIS file. Save as a dwg. Import in Sketchup.

Works great.

That's a Windows settings. Look under Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options.

@unknownuser said:

Chunky Bacon.

Ok. This is seriously out there. Seriously. Thanks for the reference.

While reading this little ditty, I found the Ruby Bride and the RDE, which I will try out.

Chunky Bacon....

chris

Good morning all,

I would like to start learning some Sketchup ruby development and began looking at the tools in Sketchup for ruby creation/editing and the cupboard is pretty bare. All I could find was the Ruby Console window.

What tools (IDE's, editors, etc) do you use to do Sketchup Ruby development? The ability to step through a script line by line to see the effects would be a TREMENDOUS assist.

Thanks in advance

chris

@cdubea said:

TIG,

Any chance of getting the Xref Manager tweaked to show only the top level components in the Xref Manager dialog bog?

Thanks,

chris

Due to multiple issues, I've gotten to the point where this tool is no longer useful to me.

These are (in no particular order)

1. Inability to effectively deal with multiply nested parts. This is due to the fact that ALL xref'd components of ALL components are listed in the manager. This causes multiple rebuilding to be required and WILL go into an infinite loop requiring Sketchup to be shut down.

2. Issues with sub component names not being updated. A part that I renamed the components did not update properly. Some component names changed, some didn't.

3. Had issues with component names have #1... being added to them.

Any chance of getting some of these things rectified?

Please?

chris

@keepondraggin said:

I have a newbie question.
I am a chief architect and AutoCad user. I have a plan im working on that I want to import to sketchup. I used the import DWG option in sketchup but the scale is all wrong. Before I make things worse is there a specific way to scale the drawing?
Sketchup says the dimensions are correct but i have bryce in there and im pretty sure he is taller than a doorknob

When importing from autocad files there is an option button to set the appropriate units. Make certain it's set correctly.

TIG,

Any chance of getting the Xref Manager tweaked to show only the top level components in the Xref Manager dialog bog?

Thanks,

chris

@rob d said:

Chris

Thanks for the hint on using the xref ruby. I hadn't realised you could xref components with it too. That's made my day!

Well don't get too ecstatic. The tool is sort of broken. If you have a file with components which themselves are made of components you have to be careful. If you modify a component several 'layers' down and then open the top most file, the xref manager will want to update that component and it's parent component. Unfortunately this will send the ruby and Sketchup off into never-never land as it is evidently a circular reference.

I've asked TIG (the author) to modify the xref ruby to only show the components inserted directly in the file (not any of the 'children') but he has failed to respond.

You can work around this by setting the update on all the lower level child components to OK in the manager and only updating the highest level children.

In SolidWorks we call these parts and assemblies, but since that nomenclature is not present in Sketchup, I'm attempting to adapt ;>

I posted a file in the xref ruby discussion area. You can download it and see what I'm driving at. Perhaps if more people poke TIG he will fix the script.

Have fun,

chris

The problem seems to stem from files made up of components which themselves are made up of components.

The file Folding Workbench file consists of 3 components each of which is made up of multiple components. If your process limited itself to the components actually in the file it would probably be okay. I played around in the manager and if I only allowed the components in the Folding Workbench file to refresh all was well.

Your tool allows me to work with files in the same manner I do in the other modeler I use, which is SolidWorks. Splitting files into multiple components allows me to dimension the components in a logical manner (at least for me) without using multiple scenes and such.

Thanks for looking at this. All the components are in the parent folder of the main file. This should make it easy to reconnect if you want to test your code on it.

Chris

TIG,

I've been using the Xref Manager and it works well on small models. Larger models with more than one 'assembly' cause it to lock up when refreshing.

Please see the attached file

thanks for looking at this,

chris

---

Folding Workbench.zip

@jean lemire said:

Hi Chris, hi folks.

You can use scenes to focus on each part. You can even print the scenes to scale if you use standard views (top, face, back, right, left, bottom) and disable perspective.

See attached SU file for ideas.

Thanks this is helpful.

@rob d said:

Chris

Make sure all parts of your drawing are created as components. Go to window "outliner" and click on each component and "save as". You can then open each of these files individually to dimension them.

A further tip. If you want to dimension orthographic views, it's best to export views as dwg/dxf and reimport so that your dimension leaders snap correctly. There's a ruby somewhere which does orthographic views automatically.

regards
Rob

This is essentially what I wound up doing. I augment this with the xref ruby that allows you to mark each component as an 'xref' for update and such. This way I can modify the components and then have them updated in the top level file. A lot like SolidWorks does, but not quite so straightforward.

I'll look for the orthographic ruby. That sounds handy.

Thanks to all

@didier bur said:

Hi cdubea,

with rmh.skp, I got the following message in the console:
Error: #<ArgumentError: Not enough points - at least 3 required>
If you open the stl file in a text editor, you'll see that coordinates are given in scientific notation (vertex 4.613638e+000 2.150841e+000 7.951958e-002 for instance). That doesn't disturb Ruby, but values are very small, this may be the problem (with SU autosnap feature I guess).
An intersting test would be to scale your original model by 1000 or 10000, re-export the stl and see what's happening then when importing in SU.
Regards,

Looks much better.

Thanks for making this available.

---

Wire Mold.zip

This is an awesome add-in!

It allows me to work with Sketchup in a way which is similar to the way SolidWorks manages files.

Thanks!

Can I ask an ENORMOUS favor? Can your menus be included in the right mouse button menus?

That would be a tremendous "click" saver.

Thanks again,

chris

@didier bur said:

Hi cdubea,

with rmh.skp, I got the following message in the console:
Error: #<ArgumentError: Not enough points - at least 3 required>
If you open the stl file in a text editor, you'll see that coordinates are given in scientific notation (vertex 4.613638e+000 2.150841e+000 7.951958e-002 for instance). That doesn't disturb Ruby, but values are very small, this may be the problem (with SU autosnap feature I guess).
An interesting test would be to scale your original model by 1000 or 10000, re-export the stl and see what's happening then when importing in SU.
Regards,

No problem. I'll give it a try and report back.

chris

@watkins said:

Dear Chris,

As you say, disappointing.

Did you see the link to SpaceClaim posted a few days ago?

http://www.spaceclaim.com/

Regards,
Bob

I'm familiar with SpaceClaim. Michael Payne was one of the architects of SolidWorks many years ago and left when Dassault Systemes bought SolidWorks. I've been involved with SolidWorks since '96.

The pricing on the LT version is very reasonable. If I'm not mistaken, the pro version is done on a perpetual lease basis. It's a nominal fee up front with an annual fee to use the software.