Posts made by Fletch

Advanced Scene Organizer: Ideally a complete overhaul and extreme expansion of SU's scene dialog capabilies is in order, IMHO.

I'd really like to have, at very least, the ability to have rows of tabs at the top of my SU window, instead of just one row... just drag the existing tab row down, and it shifts up a second, third, fourth, however many rows you want of scene tabs, then you could select one or groups of tabs and drag-n-drop them to where you want them. I'd like to also select muliple scenes to rename them, yet keep a number before or after them... Entry1,2,3,4,5... Corridor1,2,3,4,5... etc. Multiple Scene editability (change all selected scene's camera FOV, change the animation settings for a selected scene or for all selected scenes.
I'm animating a building at the intersection of 3 highways and I have these long animation paths along each highway showing what the building views looks like... and SU's scene dialog only lets me see 7 at a time and forces the view of the scene names back to the top after changing a single scene name.

I have RickW's "Edit Scene Times" ruby and Todd's "Renumber Scenes" ruby, but what I am in desperate need of is a Scene Organizer Web Dialog. I have a file currently with over 100 scenes... I need to be able to see them all at once, drag and drop groups, group rename, etc.

Anyone else need something/want something like this or am I just stuff-out-of-luck?

I thought it could perhaps be an extension of the Edit Scene Times web dialog.

I'd really like to have rows of tabs at the top of my SU window, instead of just one row... just drag the existing tab row down, and it shifts up a second, third, fourth, however many rows you want of scene tabs, then you could select one or groups of tabs and drag-n-drop them to where you want them. I'd like to also select muliple scenes to rename them, yet keep a number before or after them... Entry1,2,3,4,5... Corridor1,2,3,4,5... etc.

I'm animating a building at the intersection of 3 highways and I have these long animation paths along each highway showing what the building views looks like... and SU's scene dialog only lets me see 7 at a time and forces the view of the scene names back to the top after changing a single scene name.

all my scenes were playing smoothly inside of SU.
then I ran the FP2 script to create a 'better' cam path (instead of SU's natural 'pillowing' or 'arcing' effect for the cam transitions)

After that I ran the scene timing script... trying to eliminate SU from stopping on each frame.

2 things occured.

1. while it exports smoothly as an .avi, it plays stop-n-go in SU
2. next time I tried to add some SU cams moving along another are of the same model, they were stop-n-go, instead of playing smoothly.

Fascinatingly...
I opened the file the next day, and the transitions were smooth even with the scenes that were stop-n-go the previous day.

I don't know what to tell you, Rick. It's completely unpredictable.

I am running SU on a very hi-end graphics card and have 3Gigs of Ram... so am very confused.

Hi Wikii! This is just what I've been wishing for! Great work! Thank you!

Sorry to write with a problem...

I downloaded this: SUTool_v0.08en.rar

It seems to load just fine, but I get this...

---

this would be really good... hopefully in SU7 this will be a part of the "sharing a model" process?!

go, Whaat, go

This seems an odd place to put your question... it's not really a discussion of ruby.

but I agree with Solo.
They are both easy to try, they both have tutorials... and both have nice exporters.

You will need to try them and see what you think.

You will get many opinions from thousands of people. But you will only know your answer when you try them for yourself.

I have not used Indigo so cannot comment on its usage/features, but I will say that Kerkythea allows you to choose from many different render methods very easily. This is one of the main reasons why I use it/like it so much.

Hi Rick!

I guess my question is why it seems to mess up my ability to add a 'normal' scene after using the flightpath script.

I will try to figure out a way to 'convert' the FP2 cams to 'regular old SU cams'.

What would be good, maybe, is a simple tool just like FP2, but that does not try to set the transition time, delaty times, etc... just puts in cams at the target and interval specified, then one could apply and tweak the SU native scene transitions and delays?

Remember,

@unknownuser said:

Bugs and limitations:
-BUG. If you start a FFD and the control points don't match the object you need to explode and regroup the object. Then try the FFD again.
-Only one FFD at a time. The script uses a few globals for speed.
-Only works on geometry in a group and only one layer deep.
-Sometimes hidden edges don't move right. Dont know why. Might be a bug in Sketchup.

If you try this script much, it's tempting to 'do it again' in the same file... but SU will become very unstable... especially if you hit the undo with 2 FFDs in the file.

Best to heed Chris's warnings.

Great job with this script, Chris.
I would imagine building furniture in SU will go a lot easier now with this script to quickly tweak the angle on some chair legs, etc.

thanks Whaat... thought it would have been done already... but PLEASE DON'T DO IT RIGHT NOW

I'm really looking forward to your developing your current project.

I just saw this tut by Dave R.

It's exactly why I came here tonight... I was wondering if there's a ruby that will let you input a radius and it will apply that radius "Fillet" (in architectural terms) to all edges of your model, such as a cube...

here's the picture... can't seem to get the Img code to work on it for some reason...

Hi chagrin,
thanks... it was obvious, and I already did that but thanks for the assistance! The point that it needs a scroll bar was why I posted it.

I got an email from Rick saying that you can also right-click the window of trouble and hit 'refresh' and it should help... but didn't try it.

More importantly, I ran a tiny test to see if the animation problem was an OpenGL thing, or if it will indeed be smooth when I render the .avi... and it is smooth when you render it out

Only, what if I want to show them in SU live with OpenGL? This still needs to be fixed... hopefully Rick will find the time to fix it... there must be a better way to achieve good SU animations w/out all this fussiness.

The main prob. I saw was that after using the Flightpath script and the scene timer script, no matter what I did I could not get it to give me a smooth animation in OpenGL.

sadly, this is unacceptable for me, as I give presentation to my arch. clients using SU, not just .avi.

They love watching the SU in action. "Oh, do that again... and oh, can you go back a second, now rotate it up a bit... oh, great!" "What if it were taller?" Then I go... click click - 'like that?' "Yeah! Wow, you're amazing"... and I say 'aw, shucks...' but I digress...

Thanks Dave! I came here specifically tonight looking for an answer to this very question.

I find it odd, don't you?, that this is not a ruby script tool already.

why not just use the "push/pull multiple faces" ruby for this? That's what I use

@pixero said:

What about a "non destructive" subdivision?
Meaning: the possibility to go back to a lower subdivision for further modelling.
Then go back to the higher subdivision for rendering.

oh no... sub-object modeling in SU like in VIZ... ... too complex for my little brain to handle...

just kidding! I would like that too, but let's let him get this thing done first, shall we?! We don't want to sound ungrateful...

I am using Flightpath2 I bought with the presentationbundle2 from the smustard friends... it's like the 'Super Friends'... only in ruby format.

Anyway,
how do I get the pages created to transition smoothly? They jump and stop, jump and stop, jump and stop... and when I change the transition speed for my scenes, they don't change with it.

http://www.smustard.com/script/PageUtilities2
in the scene timing dialog in my skippy, there are too many scenes and I can't get to the scenes on the bottom... argh!!!!

I temporarily excluded most scenes so I could see in the web dialog the ones I needed to change.

%(#BF4040)[This doesn't work for getting rid of the flightpath2 scene delay times...
grr... is it a bug?
"A value of -1 reverts to the global values set in the Model Info dialog box."]

@mateo soletic said:

Most active topic: Swollen blast capacity...
Location: In a dim light
Age: 92
Occupation: I like to bring it. Eat sandwiches. Work the curves until we blur.
Interests: In a dim light

Even when he is not here he makes my day.

indeed!

Well, he's been gone so long most of us probably forgot about him by now... but anyone know what happened to Shaun Tennant? His last post was in Sept. and mentioned doing work on a new house and that he may be back in November.

I think his wife made him go into some 12-step-SketchUp re-hab program after an 'Intervention' with all her friends and relatives and now they have successfully 'cured' him...

our loss, her gain... :egrin:

If it's true, does it still qualify as a joke, if it's funny?!

At the 1994 annual awards dinner given for Forensic Science, AAFS President Dr. Don Harper Mills astounded his audience with the legal complications of a bizarre death.

Here is the story:

On March 23, 1994 the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald Opus, and concluded that he died from a shotgun wound to the head. Mr. Opus had jumped from the top of a ten-story building intending to commit suicide. He left a note indicating his despondency. As he fell past the ninth floor, his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast passing through a window, which killed him instantly. Neither the shooter nor the deceased was aware that a safety net had been installed just below the eighth floor level to protect some building workers and that Ronald Opus would not have been able to complete his suicide the way he had planned

"Ordinarily," Dr Mills continued, "Someone who sets out to commit suicide and ultimately succeeds, even though the mechanism might not be what he intended, is still defined as committing suicide." That Mr. Opus was shot on the way to certain death, but probably would not have been successful because of the safety net, caused the medical examiner to feel that he had a homicide on his hands.

The room on the ninth floor, where the shotgun blast emanated, was occupied by an elderly man and his wife. They were arguing vigorously, and he was threatening her with a shotgun! The man was so upset that when he pulled the trigger, he completely missed his wife, and the pellets went through the window, striking Mr. Opus. When one intends to kill subject "A" but kills subject "B" in the attempt, one is guilty of the murder of subject "B."

When confronted with the murder charge, the old man and his wife were both adamant, and both said that they thought the shotgun was not loaded. The old man said it was a long-standing habit to threaten his wife with the unloaded shotgun. He had no intention to murder her. Therefore the killing of Mr. Opus appeared to be an accident; that is, assuming the gun had been accidentally loaded.

The continuing investigation turned up a witness who saw the old couple's son loading the shotgun about six weeks prior to the fatal accident..

It transpired that the old lady had cut off her son's financial support and the son, knowing the propensity of his father to use the shotgun threateningly, loaded the gun with the expectation that his father would shoot his mother.

Since the loader of the gun was aware of this, he was guilty of the murder even though he didn't actually pull the trigger. The case now becomes one of murder on the part of the son for the death of Ronald Opus.

Now comes the exquisite twist. Further investigation revealed that the son was, in fact, Ronald Opus. He had become increasingly despondent over the failure of his attempt to engineer his mother's murder. This led him to jump off the ten-story building on March 23rd, only to be killed by a shotgun blast passing through the ninth story window.

The son, Ronald Opus, had actually murdered himself. So the medical examiner closed the case as a suicide.

A true story from Associated Press, (Reported by Kurt Westervelt)*

@unknownuser said:

The roundest knight at King Arthur's round table was Sir Cumference.

I cannot believe I laughed as much as I did at that one... sheesh...

ok,
did you hear about the man who's dog had no legs? he named him 'Cigarette' and once a day he'd take him out for a drag.

His brother had no arms or legs... they found him as a baby in a pile of leaves... they named him Russel. But when he took up water skiing he changed his name to Skip.

(If you are not a native speaker of American English, you are fortunate that some of these unfunny jokes make no sense to you whatsoever! You can happily pretend they never happened.)