Doing photomatch with multiple source photos can be confusing. Here is a good workflow.

• Bring in your first photos and do the photo match calibration.
• Draw some basic massing
• Now, before you bring in your second photo move your axis location (the tool with the red blue and green arrow) to a corner of your building that will be visible in the photo you are about to bring in.
• Then import the second photo and calibrate.
• Repeat this process (move origin then import and calibrate photo) for any additional photos.

If you loop around your building and your last photo doesn't match well with the first then you may have to make some adjustments to earlier calibrations. I would keep massing simple until all of the photos are in to your satisfaction. Then model the detail.

Hope this helps. I think I had old tutorial in the old SU forum, I'll see if I can find it on a quick search.

Was it the extended version of Photoshop?

I did a quick little diagram, but its been a while since I have had to use any trig to write a formula.

@engberg said:

I'm not sure how that helps me..

I have made a cylindar in the center of the sketchup world - and it's in view when I export it to .3ds, but still it seems out of center..

I think the origin that SketchUp gives the exported file may be the bottom left of the current screen view, vs something like the center of the screen. My point is, that if you want your cylinder to be centered in your new application then pick the center of one of the ends of the cylinder and move it so it is "centered" whatever centered happens to be. Do you mean you want the origin of the model in your new application to be the center of the cylinder?

It isn't an ideal workflow, it would be nice if SketchUp respected the origin with an export, but all you have to do is move it.

When you import a DXF or DWG file into SketchUp there is a checkbox to decide if you want to preserve the drawing origin. There is not a similar checkbox for exporting to DWG/DXF. If I remember correctly the origin of the resulting file is dependant on your camera view at the time of export. This was always annoying when I had to export something a second time and needed it to align with the original export.

I had to either use a saved scene, or have a reference point on both exports that I can use to re align them. Maybe you can make a mark at the center of the circle to align them.

Did this just start happening? was there a new install of Photoshop or any other change you can think of. I think the idea of changing the image editing app in SU is a good idea. If I remember correctly CS4 extended can open a number of 3d formats including KML/KMZ.

You could try uninstalling Photoshop for your presentation, or maybe create a new user account that doesn't have access to Photoshop?

By the way Barry, just looking at the Google Docs drawing tools, looks like a simplified version of Layout's drawings tools. While I can certainly share my presentations by saving them to PDF and uploading to web, it would be nice to have a "publish to Google Doc's Drawing document" button. The nice thing about that is much of the content would be editable by collaborators using the Google Doc drawing tools.

Similarly being able to import Google Docs Drawings would be nice. Of course if You had saved a Layout File to Google Doc then the model viewports would have been converted to png/jpg and then when you bring it back to Layout it would still be a png/jpg, wouldn't turn back into what it was to start with; but I'm thinking more of a one way workflow, although I could see pushing an updated version of the viewport back up from Layout to Google Docs.

Then it would be nice to be able to hyperlink from the Google Doc png/jpg image of a model to that model in 3DWH.

David

Would be great if this could somehow be tied in with Google docs. Ideal workflow would be to be able to paste a selection from a Google docs spreadsheet and have a live link between that and the Layout file.

If you want to edit the table, a double click could launch the google docs file.

Using Layout is another alternative when trying to control the aspect ratio. Its also great if you have many scenes to export. With Layout you have to setup the page the first time, but on subsequent prints, it just a single click. If you are careful with your scene naming you can use old Layout files already setup, and swap out the source model.

File size seems vary large, I'm thinking there are some big textures or background images that can be removed or down sampled to a smaller size.

First think to try is to go to the "window" menu at choose "Model Info/Statistics/ purge unused.

This will remove unused materials and components that may be making the file larger.

Is it just slow opening and closing and seems fine while you are using the open file?

Matthias, asking if a face is shaded or in the sun is tricky, because it may be partially shaded.

If you query all of the verticies you could put it into one of these groups.
A . mostly sun exposed
B. partially sun exposed
C. mostly shaded

The reason A and C are not complete is that even if all of the vertices are in sun or shade, there may still be points along an edge or in the middle of the face where there is a different sun condition.

Loosely related to this question, if you choose to do an energy simulation with EnergyPlus (using the OpenStudio plugin or another tool) you can run the "Shading Summary" report to return the fraction of each window that is sunlit at 9am, noon, and 3pm on (March 21, June, 21, December 21st). Here is a link to PDF with a sample of that report. Again this isn't direct out of SketchUp, but is processed through EnergyPlus
http://apps1.eere.energy.gov/buildings/energyplus/pdfs/OutputDetailsAndExamples.pdf#page=140

So if this is a bug here is my workaround may be to create similar results by using min and max points for the two bounding boxes being intersected. For my use I just need to know if they intersect, not what that resulting bounding box is.

This isn't code, just outline of what I'm thinking

Get min max for bounding box a and b
min a
max a
min b
max b

if
min ax < min bx < max ax or min ax < max bx < max ax
and
min ay < min by < max ay or min ay < max by < max ay
and
min az < min bz < max az or min az < max bz < max az

 then bounding boxes intersect

else
they don’t intersect

Nope, I'm using current version of 7.1 on PC, I haven't tried on my mac PC at home.

If you don't want to place and then move your section cut here is a method.

Mouse over a face parallel to the plane you want for your section cut. Then hold down shift. This locks the orientation of your section plane. now you can move up your wall to the desired height and click to place the section plane. This makes if very quick and easy to make sure you are cutting or not cutting through a window (depending upon your preferences).

I thought it was a long way from home as well. I thought it would be an empty bounding box without any points, so I didn't know what I expected corner 0 to return, I thought maybe "nil"

By the way, here is what I get for points on a new empty bounding box.

boundbox = Geom;;BoundingBox.new
puts boundbox.height
puts boundbox.width
puts boundbox.depth
puts boundbox.corner 0
puts boundbox.corner 1
puts boundbox.corner 2
puts boundbox.corner 3
puts boundbox.corner 4
puts boundbox.corner 5
puts boundbox.corner 6
puts boundbox.corner 7
boundbox.valid?

Height, Depth, and Width return 0 (instead of the 8'4" that came up on my earlier example), but still large number for point coordinates. The 8'4" is the 100 inches, but I don't know how that ever got to be the height in the earlier example.

0"
0"
0"
(1000000000000000000000000000000", 1000000000000000000000000000000", 1000000000000000000000000000000")
(-1000000000000000000000000000000", 1000000000000000000000000000000", 1000000000000000000000000000000")
(1000000000000000000000000000000", -1000000000000000000000000000000", 1000000000000000000000000000000")
(-1000000000000000000000000000000", -1000000000000000000000000000000", 1000000000000000000000000000000")
(1000000000000000000000000000000", 1000000000000000000000000000000", -1000000000000000000000000000000")
(-1000000000000000000000000000000", 1000000000000000000000000000000", -1000000000000000000000000000000")
(1000000000000000000000000000000", -1000000000000000000000000000000", -1000000000000000000000000000000")
(-1000000000000000000000000000000", -1000000000000000000000000000000", -1000000000000000000000000000000")
"false"

Has anyone had problems with this. This is my first time using it, and I'm using it in conjunction with valid? to see if there are any points.

What I've found is that if my two groups (in this case cubes) don't share any X-axis limits, then it correctly identifies if the objects touch or not. If however they have overlapping X-axis limits, it always returns "true" for BoundingBox.intersect.valid? even if the Y-axis and Z-axis limits don't overlap at all. If any of the three axes don't overlap the valid? should return "false" Below I took the code from the API sample and adjusted it to show two parallel lines that are running along the Y and then the X axis. They should both return false, but the pair along the X axis returns true.

Any thoughts on this?

Error 404 (Not Found)!!1

(code.google.com)

 boundingbox1 = Geom;;BoundingBox.new
 boundingbox1.add [0,0,0]
 boundingbox1.add [0,100,0]
 boundingbox2 = Geom;;BoundingBox.new
 boundingbox2.add [100,0,0]
 boundingbox2.add [100,100,0]
 boundingboxA = boundingbox1.intersect boundingbox2
 puts boundingboxA.valid?

 boundingbox3 = Geom;;BoundingBox.new
 boundingbox3.add [0,0,0]
 boundingbox3.add [100,0,0]
 boundingbox4 = Geom;;BoundingBox.new
 boundingbox4.add [0,100,0]
 boundingbox4.add [100,100,0]
 boundingboxB = boundingbox3.intersect boundingbox4
 puts boundingboxB.valid?

boundingboxA.valid? correctly returns "false"
boundingboxB.valid? incorrectly returns "true"

FYI - I have attached a screenshots of a simple example using two cubes where one returns true and the other false. Code above is similar but just two lines, vs. two boxes.

![This correctly shows boundingbox.intersect? as "false"](/uploads/imported_attachments/EJqD_intersectreturnsfalse.png "This correctly shows boundingbox.intersect? as "false"")
![This incorrectly shows boundingbox.intersect? as "true"](/uploads/imported_attachments/psx5_intersectreturnstrue.png "This incorrectly shows boundingbox.intersect? as "true"")

Just a short followup. If I add the following code to each pair of lines here are the results

 puts boundingboxA.diagonal
 puts boundingboxA.height
 puts boundingboxA.depth
 puts boundingboxA.width
 puts boundingboxA.corner (0)
 puts boundingboxA.corner (1)
 puts boundingboxA.corner (2)
 puts boundingboxA.corner (3)
 puts boundingboxA.corner (4)
 puts boundingboxA.corner (5)
 puts boundingboxA.corner (6)
 puts boundingboxA.corner (7)

8' 4"
8' 4"
0"
0"
(1000000000000000000000000000000", 0", 0")
(-1000000000000000000000000000000", 0", 0")
(1000000000000000000000000000000", 100", 0")
(-1000000000000000000000000000000", 100", 0")
(1000000000000000000000000000000", 0", 0")
(-1000000000000000000000000000000", 0", 0")
(1000000000000000000000000000000", 100", 0")
(-1000000000000000000000000000000", 100", 0")
false
8' 4"
0"
0"
8' 4"
(1000000000000000000000000000000", 0", 0")
(100", 1000000000000000000000000000000", 0")
(0", -1000000000000000000000000000000", 0")
(100", -1000000000000000000000000000000", 0")
(0", 1000000000000000000000000000000", 0")
(100", 1000000000000000000000000000000", 0")
(0", -1000000000000000000000000000000", 0")
(100", -1000000000000000000000000000000", 0")
true
""

thanks, I'll give that a try.

David

update:

Chris, thanks! that worked perfectly.

It seems within a group that it gives the bounds relative to the group origin vs. the global origin.

So if I test two faces each in different groups. If the faces do overlap, the test passes when the group origins are the same, but fails if the group origins are not the same.

If I want to find the bounding box for the group as as whole, then it seems I have the option to use bounds (for global) or local_bounds (for local), but I can't seem to apply that principle to objects within a group.

There doesn't seem to be a "global.bounds" method similar to "local.bounds". Is there a way to mimic this using transformation.

Here is what I'm trying to do. I have two faces in different groups. I want to see if their bounding boxes overlap using something like "bounds_a.contains? (bounds_b)".

I can find the transformation for the parent group for each face, but I can't apply that transformation to the bounding box. Below is a link to a post with some code showing how to transform a corner of the bounding box. I suppose I could do this for all 8 corners and then make a new bounding box, but I'm iterating through a lot of entities, and that may slow it down more than necessary. Any thoughts?
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=25752&p=221660&hilit=transform+a+bounding+box#p221660

my_comp = a_component
t = my_comp.transformation
comp_def = my_comp.definition
def_t = comp_def.bounds.corner(0)
new_t = t * def_t

Code came from Chris Fullmer's post in the thread

David

I want to overlay text on the screen as part of a ruby. I see two options.

If the text is known ahead of time and there are a limited number of choices, I can pre-setup watermarks to use. But in some cases I want custom text based on user input. For this it seems a text object will work, but I'd love to have the object visible but not selectable by the user. I noticed that text objects (with leader to model or floating on screen) can't be locked on their own. You can group make it a group, but then it is attached to the model vs. a position on the screen.

I guess my third option is just to keep the data as part of a dialog box; but I thought a screen overlay head's up display for some data would be slick. This isn't data that will just pop up while something is running. It would be on the screen while the user is working on the model.

Does anyone have other ideas for overlaying text on the screen?