On you first image I think it twill interset if you use the API to interset. I have found that the manual intersect requires a face not parallel to the target surface, but the API implementation only requires an edge. So what you have drawn would intersect if you use the API.

This video shows the intersect method similar to your first image at about 2 minutes in.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=rIO_jcvq2Vc

@unknownuser said:

Selection Toys has some basic functions to select all parallel or perpendicular.

If it doesn't already, it would be cool to have checkbox to only select parallel with same face normal direction, vs. opposite.

Kind of related to this one tool I always thought would be really cool is one that lets you draw a window or crossing box drill down through groups. If you are familar with Adobe Illustrator, they have a selection tool and then a direct selection tool. It acts very much like this. One issue with this in SketchUp is that if you had rotated one of the groups and then try and move a surface within that group, it will move in the wrong direction. Actually I have an old video showing that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tsx3dlSb0uI

Do any of the selection plugins offer face orientation as a filter? OpenStudio does this but you would spend more work converting this to OpenStuido than repainting with thru paint.

So, I was also hoping for something like this without using a custom tool. As an alternative I'm thinking of re-sorting the selection array based one some logic. In this case I want to take a bunch of horizontal adjacent surfaces, and turn them into room numbers. As is they jump all over the place. I was going to allow the user to click to define, but another solution could be to start with bottom left corner and work my way around. Here is the logic I was thinking of.

• Set the face with lowest "x" and then "y" as a tiebreaker as first object (they all have same z)
• Next find the adjacent face with the lowest "x" and then "y" as tiebreaker
• keep repeating step above, excluding spaces that have already been added to new array.
• In many cases I can step through all faces without painting myself in a corner, but in some cases, I may have gotten to a situation where there are no adjacent faces, but not all faces have been added to the new array. If i do get painted into a corner, I would just go back to step 1 with remaining faces.

Has anyone done any programmatic re-ordering of the selection similar to this?

May also want to look at 1001 shadow tools, although it may just project onto ground, and not onto building surfaces.
http://www.1001shadows.com/en/index.html

David

Just as an update to this post, we just released OpenStudio 0.6.0 at the end of December. This builds on 0.5 by adding more HVAC templates and also adds gbXML import, and a number of user scripts.

Here is a link to a video on the gbXML import.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E5qCqpe8xk&list=PL54FE3146BF7A2221&index=5&feature=plpp_video

We also created a new 101 tutorial series for this release. The old one was very outdated (from 0.3.0).
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL647CC3A5AA51AA6B&feature=plcp

Lots of exciting improvements coming in 0.7.0.

Wasn't there a 1001 shadow tools plugin that crated vector objects for shadows?.

If you do go the hybrid approach that gives raster shadows, could probably get good vector object using Adobe Illustrator.

In addition to right clicking to update a component, you can also save a component to its own sketchup file. You can then have multiple versions of this component and load in the one you want. It also allows multiple people to work on a project at the same time. You can flip a component along its x, y or z axis to accomplish a mirror.

It has been a while since I posted about OpenStudio. This is NREL's energy modeling software. In the past it has been mainly a SketchUp Plugin working with the EnergyPlus IDF file format. EnergyPlus is the simulation used to run the simulations from the models. We have expanded it quite a bit. There is still a SketchUp plugin, but there are also a number of stand alone applications. Everything is Mac, Windows, and Linux (expect of course the plugin is only Mac and Windows). We introduced a new OSM file format a few versions ago, but with 0.5.0 have really expanded the model. Users now create spaces which roughly represent rooms, and then gather spaces together to make thermal zones. This allows for improved early design workflows. We are also working integration with other simulation engines, in particular Radiance, but as this is an OpenSource project, others could build integration with other simulation engines as well.

Here is a link to a youtube playlist highlighting some of the new features.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmElVV3aU6Q&list=PLED79ED04AE1B6760&feature=plpp

One of the primary stand alone applications in OpenStudio is SystemOutliner. This is used to create the mechanical systems for the project. Below is a youtube video demonstrating plant loops, which were just introduced.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZETUm1niaDs

Loads are assigned in the SketchUp Plugin by assigning space types to individual spaces. The building envelope of course also influences the loads. Then the thermostat is assigned to each thermal zone defining what the target temperatures are.

We have a lot more planned for future releases.

David,

--
David Goldwasser, LEED AP
National Renewable Energy Laboratory

I went to the SketchUp site to grab the SU icon for a presentation, and realized it isn't anywhere on the site (maybe hidden in corner somewhere?). This is what I saw. I hadn't seen this, but then again I hadn't been to the site in a while.

That is for Pro. The Free version looses the drawings and blue import/export arrows.

Error 404 (Not Found)!!1

(sketchup.google.com)

@unknownuser said:

I'm curious - Did this technique for designating zones ever get implemented in the OpenStudio plugin?

I never got a chance to implement this, but I'm working on something similar for the next release, but was just a bit easier to code. It will take a loose selection of geometry (a clean building plan diagram) and will convert each surface into a Space object, and will extrude them to the requested height.) Another big change for the next release is that geometry is drawn in a space vs. a thermal zone. You then assign spaces to thermal zones. This allows you to design in more of an architectural view and then combine rooms into zones. Each space can also have space type assigned. Load and even constructions can then be assigned to a space type.

It is a big change so I will add a lot of new video tutorials after the release.

So here my latest thought. Create a tool to draw a 2d rectangle on screen. Depending upon the direction of the rectangle it becomes a window or crossing box (or I have separate tools for each so direction it is drawn doesn't play a role).

Then I use view.PickRay on the corners of the 2d rectangle.

If I am using my rectangle as a window, I test vector from camera to each point in the model to see if it lies within the rectangle (x and y ray range test against my rectangle). If all the points of a face are pass the test that face and attached edges are in the selection (in my case I only care about faces, not edges). If any point of a face fails the test then that face is not in the selection.

If I am using my rectangle as a crossing box, then I want to test each face in my model to see if it intersects with any of the four rays from my 2d triangle. If any of the four rays intersect a face, then that face is included in the selection. This doesn't address edges, which is OK for my use.

If I wanted to get edges in crossing box, it would be great to convert the edge to 2d line on screen, and then see if the edge points either pass the ray range test, or interest the lines that make up the rectangle. Haven't dug into the API to see if that is even possible.)

An entirely different approach (again just for faces, and in this case just window, not crossing box) would be to have the script first copy every point in the model to a loose top level point. Then I would activate the built in SketchUp selection tool. The user would make a section like they normally do. This would create an array of 3d points. I could then test the nested faces. If all of the points of a given face are in the 3d point array, then that face would be selected. I would loop through all faces, and then throw away the temporary top level points used to make the array in the first place. This solution doesn't seem nearly as clean as the first solution.

So if I decide I want to try to open that can of worms, how would you go about creating the section across the groups. For me the ideal workflow would be to create an alternative version of sketchUp's select tool that works more like Adobe's direct select tool (digging into nested groups to make selection). I probably only need to dig one level down for my needs.

I guess using the existing crossing box I would want to find out what points in the model fall within a certain x,y range for the current camera and screen view. If I can grab the x,y clicks for my crossing/box window, then I can use this method to test the points in the model
http://code.google.com/intl/zh-CN/apis/sketchup/docs/ourdoc/view.html#screen_coords

Pickhelper seems like it would be useful for finding screen coordinates of clicks, but may have to click two separate points vs. a click/drag operation?
http://code.google.com/intl/zh-CN/apis/sketchup/docs/ourdoc/pickhelper.html

If the above solution doesn't work I have two other ideas, but neither one is particularly clean.

a. require the user to draw a physical box which will serve as a bounding box for the crossing box or window
b. Create copy of all points in the model to loose top level objects. I could then use the existing select tool to make a crossing box or window, but would need to associate each temporary point with the original nested point before I could run an operation on the selection.

I have done some testing with standard move tool, and if my groups have not been rotated all is well. It is possible I can run through process to un-rotate groups prior to this if people want to use it, or make a custom move tool. Move is the main tool I'm interested in. Currently I'm making my multi-group selection by searching attributes associated with the surfaces, but the ideal solution is to search against a crossing box or window. Haven't really looked at API access to select tool to see if I can loop through a test through all groups against that selection box.

non rotated groups
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZdcWmX3mMM

If I rotate the groups, then the movement is incorrect in the rotated zone. It is moving along x relative to group vs. model origin.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tsx3dlSb0uI

What I'm looking for is basically an alternate version of the select tool that allows me to make selections using crossing box or window that spans across all zones. Basically as if my model was exploded. Could dig all the way into groups, or maybe user configurable number of levels. The SketchUp equivalent of Adobe's Direct Selection tool. I think this is doable, but didn't know if anyone has already tackled it. For window faces would only be included if all points of the face were inducing in the search area. For crossing box if any of a faces points were included in search area that face would be selected.

I'm looking at this for the OpenStudio Plugin. I can't have users explode the model because I have equivalent faces on separate groups that would be merged if I exploded, and then re-grouped objects.

A related issue to this. If you select a face in a number of groups, and move X value by 10',any rotated zones will have un-expected results. Makes using the basic move tool after this kind of selection tricky, hate to have to build special move tool for this.

David

@thosford said:

@davidboulder said:

By the way, I also believe it should be pretty easy to model one point perspective. I'll post on that another time.

David,

Were you ever able to figure out how to photo match a one point perspective?

I did a quick search but couldn't find anyone with a solution.

Thanks,

Todd

Kind of, although not quite a one point perspective. If you have a situation like a main street where you have a bunch of connected facades where you only see the front of the building, but not the sides; I have a solution. Take a picture, but not straight on, shoot the photo off to the side a little so you have an x or y vanishing point. So how to you get a second vanish point? you cheat, Tilt the camera up or down so the z vanishing is your second one. To get this to work in Match Photo, before you import your photo, setup a special axes setup where you take the blue axis that is normally vertical and set it instead for your unknown x or y. Then that x or y axis becomes vertical z axis for your photo match scene. In essence if you turn your photo 90 degree sideways, it is like a normal old match photo. You are just changing which Axis Sketchup determines for you without having to really having to rotate your photo. This same technique allows you to use Match Photo on a building that doesn't have any 90 degree angles in plan, however you now need walls that are vertical, which should cover most buildings, but certainly not all. I don't have a tutorial up now, but I can try to make one when I get a chance.

Gaieus,

THANKS!

Two of the four users have already emailed back that web dialogs worked fine in a new user account.

Thanks, I'll send the users that info, and see if that works.

David

In the last to months I have had four users of our plug-in report this problem. It also effect the native Sketchup dynamic component dialogs; which also use web dialogs. This effects both SketchUp 8(and 8.1) and SketchUp 7. All for users are non-US users on Windows 7 or XP. I have not seen this at all prior to this, so the timing of this makes me thing an update to the system browser caused the problem. Attached are samples of good and bad versions of the component attributes dialog.

TIG, thanks for you help. That got me over the hump. Below is what I was looking for. If you select one or more top level groups and run this script, it will iterate through the groups adding necessary intersecting geometry under each group.

model = Sketchup.active_model
entities = model.active_entities
selection = model.selection

# loop through selection of top level groups to create new intersecting geomtry under each group.
selection.each { |entity| 
entity.entities.intersect_with(true, entity.transformation, entity.entities.parent, entity.transformation, true, entity.parent.entities.to_a)
 }