How about a randomized flat mesh?

watermaybe.skp

I do not know how, but have you read this article?

Just a moment...

(help.sketchup.com)

Thanks Tommy - it does not work on Windows. The dialog opens, but the fields are always empty regardless of the selection. I will have a look to see what i can find.

This is caused by local axes being very far from the origin. You want to use this for a fast fix:

http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=30508

One was written back in 2008 named Event Relay. It received little attention and the author last visited SketchUcation in 2009.

The code for is hosted here: https://code.google.com/p/eventrelay/wiki/EventRelay

Maybe the code could be updated.

If this were my goal and I was using Windows, I would try to create an Autohotkey script.

I have an unpublished extension (cli-select) which shows up when I did a search for "ruby"

I doubt unpublished extensions were meant to be listed. Thanks for looking into this.

I updated the plugin to fix this error. The version is 1.1.1.

Note however the dialog needs closed and reopened to recognize a renamed layer.

The code is probably not up to par for an official release to the EW. I wrote a lot of code years ago while I was out of work and had a lot of time. That was about 5 years ago. Since then, I have not had the time or energy to maintain the plugins and earn a living at the same time.

The code on Github is currently the best version to download.

You could move the Axis to align it with the component. Then you can use the Move tool and normal inference to move the component along the new axes, locking the direction with the Shift or cursor keys.

Start by right-clicking the Axes and select "Place".

If it helps after so long, here's the model with the Simplified Chinese text intact.

reedplates-text.skp

"A".ord

http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.0.0/String.html#method-i-ord

FreeDXF 0.9.0 is failing on 2 SPLINE entities in the .dxf file. I don't yet know the reason for the failure, but here is the import if we just ignore the splines.

(Yes, the TEXT and MTEXT parsing needs much work...)

10-hole-readplate-v13.skp

Try the 32-bit sketchup if you are not already using it.

I use the 32-bit version of Ruby on my 64-bit Wondows because some gems just do not work when I tried. Nokogiri was one of them.

@wootton said:

Does version 0.9.0 work with SketchUp 2015 free version? I'm currently using v0.8.2 with SketchUp 2014 (works great, thanks!)

Yeah, 0.9.0 works on 2015 Make.

Well that's interesting. Thanks.

I just wanted to correct my post. A PolygoMesh can calculate normals if the mesh is generated from a face. Read further for more details.

So, what were you expecting?

A PolygonMesh is just a container for points and triangles. It does not calculate normals.

You can retrieve the vertex normals of a mesh when the mesh is made from an existing Face, but those normals will be the normal of the Face and not any calculated value. This is why you get multiple normals from a vertex in your code and why they are all aligned with each Face normal. The normals being aligned to the global axis is because your cube faces are aligned to the global axes, am I right?

model = Sketchup.active_model
sel = model.selection
ents = model.active_entities
faces = ents.grep(Sketchup;;Face)

faces.each do |face|
    mesh = face.mesh(4)
    for idx in (1..mesh.count_points)
        norm = mesh.normal_at idx
        pt = mesh.point_at idx
        pt2 = pt.offset norm
        ents.add_cline(pt, pt2)
    end
end

There is no "plane" object in SketchUp, so SketchUp uses an Array. The values are explained in the documentation for the Geom module[1]

@unknownuser said:

A plane can be represented as either an Array of a point and a vector, or as an Array of 4 numbers that give the coefficients of a plane equation.

 plane1 = [Geom::Point3d.new(0, 0, 0), Geom::Vector3d.new(0, 0, 1)]
 plane2 = [0, 0, 1, 0]

[1] http://www.sketchup.com/intl/en/developer/docs/ourdoc/geom

@srx said:

YI can not think of the proper use for this "feature", only the mess when measuring volumes.

And what TIG found out is a real twilight zone. It has something to do with the relativity

It is useful for 3D printing because printed volumes are normally hollow to reduce material use. So if you have an outer sphere and an inner sphere where the faces are reversed, you would get the volume of material used in the 3d printing process instead of the solid volume.

Even when I fix all the reversed faces, each copy I make has a slightly different volume.

Well, anything is possible. You would need a custom Ruby plugin to accomplish everything you describe.

Maybe this model can give you an idea using only SketchUp Pro, although it's a lot of work.

donations.skp