@box said:

The mathematics is beyond my skill level, I still count by stamping my foot.

+1

One of these days I'm going to have to dive into trig -- it seems alot of things I would like to be able to do rely on trig...

Best,
Jason.

Edit -- I got it working... It was user error on my part.

Great time-saver of a plugin!

Best,
Jason.

The import function doesn't work on Sketchup 8 Pro unless I'm missing something -- the textures folder is created but nothing is in it...

Best,
Jason.

I've had Sketchup die a few times when performing sequences of filtering activities related to high-poly models -- no bug report, just died completely...

It's not a big deal because after restart I could proceed, and if I saved after each action I only lost a bit of time -- but if I could have purged those actions from memory I think I could avoid the crashes.

I suppose this goes on the feature suggestion forum... thanks for the heads-up.

Best,
Jason.

Does such an animal exist? -- I know in Photoshop I like to occasionally purge the undo history to keep the program responsive, and I thought such a tool would be handy in Sketchup as well.

A "save and purge" command or button would be ideal.

Best,
Jason.

It's not so bad -- here's the way I think of it:

OnClick animates "timeline" -- which is set to go from 0-100 (which is best thought of as a percentage of the animation complete)

timeline feeds it's value to all attributes you want to animate.

So if you want something to rotate 0-90 degrees just create an equation that multiplies timeline by .9

Negative rotation is just a by-product of me being too lazy to go in there and move the axes for each component to have them rotate properly -- it's easier and quicker to just add a minus in front of the value.

By having a timeline attribute you can create multi-stage animations where you may want some things to only happen at a particular point in the progress of the animation -- say for instance you wanted the table to flip up and after completion of that event it would then lower the legs... but that gets into more complicated math.

Best,
Jason.

Here's the fixed version.

Best,
Jason.

dynamic folding table.skp

Some really good videos to get you up to speed -- you might have to watch them more than once as they cover alot of ground

I also have a video series coming out shortly that spends several hours on the basics (and not so basics) of Dynamic Components, but it's not out yet... unfortunately it is a bit hard to find good information on -- but like most things once you get into working with them it will be easier to understand what others are doing in their DC's.

Good luck!

Best,
Jason.

Best,
Jason.

Also this is super basic... but it's worth mentioning -- when you turn the Shadows on and off in Sketchup you are enabling or disabling the sun in your Maxwell environment... regardless of whether you had it initially turned on in the Maxwell settings.

Best,
Jason.

Something else to keep in mind -- the higher the amount of sides you have the lower you can have the smoothing angle set... the smoothing function does take some system resources for rendering so a lower smoothing angle will tax your system less.

It's easy to determine the needed smoothing angle -- just divide 360 by how many sides you have.

Best,
Jason.

I will sometimes use 48 sides to create a circle, which works out to a new face every 7.5 degrees -- at the default 24 sides you are getting a new face every 15 degrees which is probably the lower threshold for something of a decent size to appear smooth, even with smoothing (Gouraud shading).

I don't see much reason to ever go above 72 sides on a circle, and would only go that high if the smooth qualities of the cylinder/circle was a primary element of the model -- or the model was huge and was to be viewed close-up.

Best,
Jason.

Are you using the "Physcial Sky" or the "Sky Dome" as the environment?

In any case you are likely to get a direct response from the plugin author if you post this here:

Page not found - Maxwell Render

Maxwell Render (www.maxwellrender.com)

He's very good at diagnosing these types of things and getting to the heart of the problem.

Best,
Jason.

You are officially my hero!

Best,
Jason.

:facepunch:  :heart_eyes:  :sunglasses:  :sunny:  :tada:  :tada:  :tada:  :tada:

Yes, but there are a couple of ways you can tackle this depending on what type of user interaction you want to base the resizing on.

I would start with a simple representation of the Floor/Level and just work out the copy/scale issues, then model the details into the component.

Have a look at some of the DC staircase examples on here to see possible approaches to the issue.

Best,
Jason.

Thank-you from me as well.

As long as there are Sketchup Ruby Plugin developers Sketchup will be fine as a modelling tool... The top priority as I see it is for the Sketchup dev team to really take the time to polish up the functionality and documentation of the APIs (Ruby & C++) and add an API for Layout, then some sort of high quality plugin management scheme will probably make most users very happy.

I do wonder if some very real performance gains could be made by overhauling the internal render engine, because that seems to be the thing that slows down performance the most.

Best,
Jason.

Wow... just.... WOW.

Fredo, that rocks!

Best,
Jason.

You may find this useful:

http://alice.loria.fr/WIKI/index.php/Graphite/PGP

Best,
Jason.

Wow, I really digg the UV unwrap feature -- simple but powerful

Best,
Jason.