Another simple little Ruby I wrote but use every day. This one is just a small 2-button toolbar that Toggles Xray and Toggles Perspective view. Icons could use some work, but here it is. Place all three files in your plugins directory. CB.

XRAYToolbar.rb

This is a simple plugin I wrote, but I use it every day, so I thought I'd share. It simply rotates the selected component instance or group 90 degrees around the Z axis. Most useful when mapped to a shortcut key. It's just a lot quicker than using the built-in rotate tool, and for me, this is the most frequent rotate task. Maybe someone else has already done this, but I didn't see it. CB.

Updated 9/10/2010. Rotates multiple groups and/or comps. Also includes previous update to rotate around any cardinal axis.

Updated 9/10/2010

I understand about severity, and this being low-priority. It doesn't cause a crash! It happens to me frequently, and I just sigh and delete the extra face and surrounding edges. But I was teaching sketchup to a group of 40 members of my Guild when it happened live on screen, and about 10 people shouted out: "why does it do that? It does that to me too!". So I thought I'd consult the experts to see if there was any collective wisdom on the subject. Looks like it's just something we live with for now. CB.

I know just what you're saying. If the original 2 faces ("front" and "back" of the rectangular solid) aren't exactly parallel, then I would expect this behavior. But I'm positive they're parallel, because they were created with PP in the first place.

Sorry if this has been asked before, but I had a tough time coming up with a search query that gave a reasonable number of hits.

I often use the push-pull tool to push a portion of a rectangular solid "to nothing". That is, I want to get rid of a section. In the simplest case, imagine a cube created with the rectangle tool, followed by PP. Then use the line tool to draw a diagonal on one face. Now use the PP tool to get rid of that corner - push it to the back, and I expect the whole corner to disappear. It usually does, but sometimes it leaves just a face. I then have to go in and manually erase the 2 extra lines that get left. Why does this happen, and is there a fix? CB.

I'm also wishing we had a way to do this from a ruby script. The nearest I've come is to delete the entire model excpet for the comp instance to be saved, then save the model, and then restore the original using undo. Clumsy, but it works. CB.

J:

You are deleting entities from the active entities list while you are iterating over the same list. In other words, you are scrambling the list whilst travesing it. Don't do that. Collect all your enities into a seperate list. Then interate through that list and delete them. CB.

I needed a "point_on_face" method a while back. I can't remember who gave me this tip, but here it is:

if face.classify_point(pt) >= 1 and face.classify_point(pt) <= 4 then...

Iv'e noticed that having the outliner open makes my own rubies slow to a crawl. Of course I'm adding and deleting a lot of comp insts, so the outliner is struggling to keep up with that. I just warn my users not to use it when running my scripts. CB.

@masta squidge said:

[Ok it might be a stupid question but how accurate is this plugin on oddly shaped/curved enclosures?

Remember that SU doees not model truly curved surfaces. It approximates them with several flat faces. Turn on "hidden geometry" to see what I mean. You can specify how many "flats in a circle", which will increase accuracy at the price of performance. CB.

Hi All. I'm pretty new here, just started frequenting the old ruby forum a few months ago. I haven't been using Sketchup that long, but I really love it. So someone please give me some deeper background. Judging by the reaction, it seems like there is much more to this than just Google deciding to move the forum over to their standard product. It's probably a long story, but if someone's up to telling it, I'm up to reading about it. CB.

I've figured out that if you set display_leader to false, or leader_type = none, then you'll get this behavior, where the text will display even if it should be hidden behind an object. Anyone have an idea on how to hide the leader without this happening? CB.

Has anyone noticed that the "new" api documentation is missing stuff? By "new" I mean this: http://code.google.com/apis/sketchup/docs/developers_guide/index.html

For example, I can't find anything about the text class, like in the "old" docs: http://download.sketchup.com/sketchuphelp/gsu6_ruby/Docs/Ruby-Text.html

Or am I just not looking in the right place? CB.

I'm using the method entities:add_text("txt", pt) to add a notation to a component. But even when you rotate the comp so the notation is behind the component, it stays visible, as if I were in X-Ray mode (I'm not). Is there some attribute of the text object that makes it behave this way? I'm not using a leader. CB.

Again, this is just too cool. Have you thought about engineering applications? I'm thinking about simulating how a timber frame structure reacts to gravity and wind loads. I know engineers use a tool called Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to do this kind of modeling, but it would be great to do it directly from my sketchup models! CB.

That is totally amazing.

My Mistake. The problem I had been stuggling with was painting individual faces within an instance without changing the other instances. CB.

One issue you may run into is wanting to color two instances of the same component with different colors. I've wanted to do that in my scripts, and haven't been able to find a way. If someone knows differently, I'd love to hear about it. CB.

TIG: to_a == Make into array? Undocumented or standard ruby?
Rick: I can add any kind of item to a generic array. I was stuck on using the entities container for some reason. Your cautionary point is well made.

Thanks, guys. CB.

That's the stuff! Thanks, guys. All better now. CB.