Hi All
First Advent - Just in time for the start of the 2024 Christmas season, I wish you all a wonderful Christmas season with this nutcracker and have a good time...
[completely done with native SketchUp 2023 Pro / the hair and beard are made with Make Fur Plugin / only the walnut is taken from the 3D Warehouse: https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/.../898798a4-6a88.../Walnut
The image shown is also native SkethUp export, but overlaid with an Enscape render to get a slight sheen to the surfaces and edited in Affinity Photo 2]
Best!!

...a little Friday afternoon exercise [Victor Mousetrap]

Hi All
A small just for fun animation, made with Fredo6's Animator plugin.
Although I always struggle with the incredible amount of options and buttons of this plugin from Fredo6 I love this tool. My simple and certainly a bit silly example should motivate other users to consider using this plugin because it´s potential is so huge. It's also a good example of what SketchUp, with the right plugin of course, is capable of...
[SketchUp 2023 + Fredo6's Animator plugin, the video is made with a front-view scene without perspective. Image editing is done with Affinity Photo 2, Video edit is made with CapCut (which in this case only meant to merge 330 JPGs and add some sound mp3s), link to Fredo6´s Animator Plugin on Sketchucation]

Please Watch Video

Best

Hi all
Yesterday I actually managed to release my very first SketchUp plugin
"ViewportBuster".
Eventually it became what I wanted, what I needed and what I was able to achieve at all it passed the guidelines of the SketchUp Extension Store and especially I am happy to share my tool as one possible PNG-exporting solution with this community, especially because my previous used plugin solution came from this place here!

https://sketchucation.com/plugin/2902-viewportbuster
ViewportBuster is available as a free plugin.

The target group for this Plugin are those who rely, like me, on a cross-team but nevertheless synchronised image data export out from native SketchUp.
ViewportBuster is the small PNG exporter tool that can support all those across workplaces of different people and their individual UI setups and the correspondingly always different viewports to ensure an always predictable and consistent identical PNG export result which can even be automated to a certain extent by using individually editable presets.
Such a standardisation and synchronisation of export image data can be advantageous for everyone, but especially for those who work in larger teams and feed their image data into any downstream and equally automated production process. This could be pre-configured layout tools (e.g. InDesign) or web applications etc...
(I have released ViewportBuster for Windows versions only - simply for lack of any Mac test environment)
For me this was a pretty long, exhausting but also interesting and inspiring journey and I have not only learned a lot but above all had a lot of fun!

Hi All
finally I took some time for a little fun exercise again. Some robot pretending to be a Roman centurion and I have no idea why
(Everything is native SketchUp with Fredo6's plugins such as FredoScale, Joint-Push-Pull and Curviloft or Anton S´s Copy Along Curve plugin. The shown image export is made with Affinity Photo 2)

Hi All
I have released a second plugin ‘MaterialFinder6’.
The plugin finds and lists searched SKM materials stored on your computer in real time and loads selected materials instantly into the ‘In Model’ area of your material browser before you have even applied a material to any model itself.
The plugin bypasses the non-existent material search option of the native SkUp material browser and accesses the material you are looking for directly from your assigned hard drive location or another assigned file storage location.!

...thank you all for your kind comments
(I agree with Rich O Brien (above). SketchUp's AO style is a bit strange for me too. Maybe because it's new and I played with it here for the first time. But for sure this AO style can be used in image editing as a standalone multiply layer or something like that. At least there is this additional option).
Best!

Hi
This Green-Wall-system is based on facade anchors and wires stretched between them. Somehow quite similar to any real actual planting method later on this model-visu approach results in a vegetation system that inevitably has to be achieved by using a linear helix-spline-curve based generation method rather than any surface filling method.
I first tried to use 3D plant models, but they were unsuitable due to the sheer amount of geometry. Instead, I used about 5 small fast and sloppy done test-PNG images to imitate the plants.

[SkUp2023/ Random Tools by Alex Schreyer/ Helix along Curve by 3Dalbertsoft/ Scale and Rotate Multiple by Chris Fullmer (which btw is a tool I love!)/ Enscape/ Affinity Photo2]
(the pictures below show my initial approach, which I am very happy with so far.)

A Great work! – & thanks for the many pictures of the doing process.

@ntxdave wunderbar

Hi All
As elsewhere in this forum, where JoKe presents breathtakingly good results with the new Nano Banana AI image generation tool Modelling a tramway, I am also playing around with this tool and consider it a real milestone in AI-supported image generation, particularly due to its outstanding model consistency.
This test example, as strange as it may seem at first glance, required only two prompts and a waiting time of about 8 seconds. But since I made this nutcracker myself, Nano Banana did not overlook or misinterpret the smallest detail of my model template.
[This whole AI-thing is still somewhat ambivalent for me, a mixture of fascination and ‘what on earth is going on here?!?’]

Hi
This Green-Wall-system is based on facade anchors and wires stretched between them. Somehow quite similar to any real actual planting method later on this model-visu approach results in a vegetation system that inevitably has to be achieved by using a linear helix-spline-curve based generation method rather than any surface filling method.
I first tried to use 3D plant models, but they were unsuitable due to the sheer amount of geometry. Instead, I used about 5 small fast and sloppy done test-PNG images to imitate the plants.

[SkUp2023/ Random Tools by Alex Schreyer/ Helix along Curve by 3Dalbertsoft/ Scale and Rotate Multiple by Chris Fullmer (which btw is a tool I love!)/ Enscape/ Affinity Photo2]
(the pictures below show my initial approach, which I am very happy with so far.)

prima!

@alexpacio2013 thanks for the nice compliment!
Yes, saving your own needed presets for having them available further on is the essential benefit from this tool and was my intention for making this tool (in a much easier version) about a year ago.
By the way, having easy access to standardized export settings is an underestimated point because it makes live so much easier in any downstream workflow such as layouting or so. And you don't have to care about your own sketchup setup anymore. You or even anyone else will be able now to reproduce your own absolute identical export results again and again any time you want.

Best, and I'm glad that everything is going well now.

Ps: don't forget to setup AND SAVE your remaining 7 possible presets
Hitting the Save button saves ALL your done settings, not only W x H.
When you close sketchup and reopen it any time later, your ViewportBuster will then open with YOUR own presets...

@alexpacio2013
Hi
I am sorry to hear that you are having difficulties using the plugin.
I am still unable to reproduce your issue – please see the screenshot of my retest with your values. The Viewportbuster is doing exactly what it should.

Let's check whether Viewportbuster is saving your desired values correctly. In the plugin directory of your SketchUp, you will find this TXT file (screenshot). This TXT file saves your desired ViewportBuster-settings and actuality your txt file must also display these values now.
Please check whether your TXT file looks like the one in my screenshot.

I'm sure we'll figure out what the problem is!

(A silly question from me – why are you trying to export your randomly given viewport size of 5189 x 1750? Imagine you change your SkUp setting with any new plugin toolbars. The result would be that your viewport would change again and again and you would then export any different image ratio than today. - The purpose of the ViewportBuster plugin is to overcome these random factors and to replace them with your desired ‘standard’ values that remain constant, so to speak)

Best

...Hi alexpacio2013 and thanks for the congratulations.
Yes, of course, there is a solution, and obviously I didn't make that clear enough No one has to work with my default settings; you can set your own prefered Preset-settings as you like.
I assume you exported the image using one of my preset settings, all of which are actually in HD aspect ratio These are the settings I always prefer.
Now I've imitated your viewport proportions. Let's say you have approx. 2100px x 730px (you can see this when you use SkUp's native exporter).
You can now use these aspect-ratio-values from your given viewport in my plugin, for example as Preset 1 and Preset 2, and also save them so that they remain as consistent exortsettings for you.


And just to check – ViewportBuster exports Preset 2 exactly as it should and even with the correct automated PNG naming :

I hope I have understood your question correctly and that my answer is helpful to you.

Best

A Great work! – & thanks for the many pictures of the doing process.

Hi All
I have released a second plugin ‘MaterialFinder6’.
The plugin finds and lists searched SKM materials stored on your computer in real time and loads selected materials instantly into the ‘In Model’ area of your material browser before you have even applied a material to any model itself.
The plugin bypasses the non-existent material search option of the native SkUp material browser and accesses the material you are looking for directly from your assigned hard drive location or another assigned file storage location.!

Prima!!

klasse!