@unknownuser said:

Right. In SUbD I store all data in attributes in the definition. Currently, when the mesh is subdivided the control mesh is recreated entirely in attributes - even nested attributes. At the moment each limit-mesh entity has a unique ID that reference the ID of the control mesh so I can look up control mesh data. (I think that if a face is triangulated by autofold each new face will get a copy of the attributes.)

Sounds sofisticated. This gives me some ideas, thanks.

@unknownuser said:

I do wish we could have a more generic way to create parametric tools in SketchUp though. A framework that could be used to kick start new creations easily without everyone reinventing the low level stuff all the time. But generic high performance frameworks are challenging to get right.

Yeah, that would be ultimate. Have you started yet ?

@unknownuser said:

CEXT in that last screenshot just reference the Ruby C++ Extension that does the calculations.

Yes I was refering to a C-extension.

@unknownuser said:

You could generate the mesh triangulated while you do live deformation.

That would generate new faces, you mean. ? Getting a nice deformation result is not what I'm talking about.

We might be dependent on information gathered from a particular face further in the node-chain. Like planes and stuff..
This must go hand in hand with user doing standard modeling tools, which is out of reach of the plugin, normally.

I did noticed though, getting information from vertices is more predictable.
And edgeloops. All in all collecting data from containers is safer.

It might be a workaround using vertices to collect data for a face, but not as straightforward.
It involves doing more lookups than should be necissary.

Subd:

Ah, nice! So CEXT is doing stuff externaly then ?

Hi Tom.

Regarding getting a better user experience than the Grasshopper - Rhino interaction, it might be difficult

I'm working a bit with that right now, and it's quite disturbing how entities get's lost sporadically after edits. So referencing existing Sketchup Geometry is not a piece of cake.

I'm guessing this is due to Sketchup being a "meshmodeler" and Sketchup has to create new faces all the time to fill in geometry. (Try creating a cylinder and rotate the top around center you will see faces triangulate. A reference to a face on that surface will get lost)

Using object id's, caching the selection, or using attributes is all the same....

Don't worry Thomthom. You have helpt me so much in the past.
Therefore I was a bit surprised not getting any info at all, that's all.

I must admit, I have been cryptic regarding this project. So I have myself to blame.

Dear Tom. Please check your PM.

@unknownuser said:

ThomThomThom is not 'on the job'. He has given us some early advice, and has been very supportive, as he has been with you, I'm sure

Ok, I missunderstood that part.
And yes, he has.

Best regards/
Joel

We have alread PM each other but we are not on the "same page".
So there is no collaboration going on.

That is simply the game.

Apparently Thomthom is on the "job".

It would have been common curtesy contacting me as well since I've been
posting stuff about this plugin for over a year, and a longtime member of this forum..
But I guess this is the new Trimble policy

Anyway. You will have an alternative when this .net application keeps crashing.
I'm not going to back off!

@unknownuser said:

Building 20000 triangles using Ruby takes about a second. That is too slow!

I have no problem with 20K displaying it in OPEN_GL.
It will take a couple of seconds more even if you untriangulate the geometry.
An ex:

Ah .net, I see. That's a different thing then..

So if I may ask, have you made any efforts whatsoever getting into Sketchup ?

Ok I wait for the PM.

@unknownuser said:

It will be a plugin or a standalone ?

Yes, as Pixero said. However, Pilou you would have to update your specs to at least IE9 for SVG

@tkluysk

I thought at first you where an individual seeking to connect Sketchup with another program.

I have now looked through some tutorials at your homepage and see that the GUI and the program are quite impressive. It is more a standalone program, whereas I make use of The Sketchup API.

So I gather your first ambition simply is to export geometry to Sketchup after having created it in your program ?

For hooking it up into a webdialog I see a problem if dependent on Web_GL, as I said. Since Sketchup uses default browser. IE on windows, and there is not much to be done about that, as far as I know.

So using as an external program means you will have Sketchup send information to update WEB_GL and then back again to update Sketchup ?

Or maybe have you found another backdoor solution

Best regards/
Joel

Hello.

Yes, I'm very active working on it. I have spent many month on building the GUI, and now I'm in Sketchup building Node-methods and experimenting..

Eric Cheung's work look pretty impressive. Although never saw the GUI, which play a HUGE role in a modeler like this.

It get's easily daunting connecting nodes together.
So I have spent quite a lot of time on polishing the GUI, with context menus, icon-management, tooltips etc. All which are easily overlooked starting a project like this.

Regarding teamwork:

It really depends on if I go commersial or not. (I haven't made up my mind on that matter yet.) It depends on the progress. The plugin is not release ready.

If I do go commersial, then as you understand Teamwork will be difficult.

Was thinking of having 2 versions. 1free and 1 Pro(advanced)

But let's keep the topic open, if you wanna PM me or discuss things in the open, be my guest.

I'll probably be banned(can't compress the GIF further) but I post a demo showing an attractor point stearing the scale for some parametric cones. The scaling is dependent on distance from the point by a division. The Cones are originaly spaced out on a Polargrid.

Hah, Thanks Jiminy. That one is following around, I see..

@tkluysk

It IS an interesting topic.

I will post a more interesting GIF later so you can see where I'm at using D3.js inside a Webdialog in Sketchup.

I think it is relevant to the topic. And might be of interest.

Isent MatterMachine dependent of Crome ? And how can one implement Crome in Sketchup ?

Yes, Thanks. I used that and noticed some increase in performance.
But I have kind of abandoned the PolygonMesh for now. At least during the previewing state.

I experimented building my own meshclass with indexing of points. Instead of using PolygonMesh class as a Point container.

Keep arrays of indexes and a Hash containing Points. And the Transformation only deals with the uniq points(Hash) then. Quite a lot of speed improvements!

The advantage here is that I can reuse the objects somewhat, while I can't purge/clear(?) a PolygonMesh. So the GC should work a little less.

I'm sure you guys have/are doing something similar or more advanced...

@unknownuser said:

where incorrect number of points

No. I usually get an argumenterror in case that happends. I don't think that is it.

It's difficult to extract specific code related to this, maybe later if I find the time to build a testcase. You could probably test this quite easily. In my case it was simply a matter of adding a lot of edges. Over 20K entities in the draw commands, then BOM!

Bottom line is the crash does not occour when using GL_LINES.
So for me all is fine..

No problem, glad to help if the tip worked.

Dont use an instance variable in the iterator

@selection.each { |@entity|

Should be

@selection.each { |entity|

Otherwise I'm totally misinformed.

The values get stored in the instance variables during the session wheras the
entity variable gets executed in the iterators scope only, if that makes sense what I say..

OT

@unknownuser said:

[Off Topic Swedish: Har du sett att vi startat ett svensk subforum? Gå in under dina inställningar och lägg till om du vill se det.]

Nej! Ska genast kolla. Tack

@unknownuser said:

I'd like to get the axis of the current component beeng selected.

Do you mean the Transformation.origin ?

I mean it depends on how the component is built ?
It could be a gluing component or face me.

You could check out this topic.
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=180%26amp;t=57623%26amp;p=524693%26amp;hilit=get+component#p524693

Edit TIG was faster.

Tjena.

Let say you get a face normal called new_z.
You could say new_z is the upvector, if I remember correctly.
Anyway. new_z must be a vector. That you use as current Z-axis.

x_axez, y_axez, z_axez = new_z.axes

Howbout Array.uniq! ?

So far I have not used any draw2d methods.

@unknownuser said:

Did you find out which is the maximum of points that causes problems?

I have come back from 3 million points without crash.
But that was really sluggish. My card start to work hard at around 20K points.

I have not had any problems with points. There pretty fast. Although, I imagine you are more picky than me since you want to create nice widgets for your framework
I have seen the reports about deleted commands and experienced it myself. But when ordering them as recommended it seams to work.

Could there be a speed difference depending on what kind of pointmode one use ?
I use 3 (+) with 10. So it looks like a point.

Edit: Removed some irrelevant stuff..

Around this amount made draw_lines crash:

48 000 edges
32 000 faces
148 000 Points

This was in an empty scene. So only view.draw items where displayed.

Maybe a few more observations while I'm at it. This is purely speculative based on impressions. And also dependent on Graphic card?
The subject may have been described earlier, I havent seen it.

Changing colors seams to be immediate. Even on very large collections, assuming you can get a hold on the objects easily.

I also get the impression GL_LINES are harder to render than GL_TRIANGLES.
There are sideeffects that I don't see using faces only when using plenty of geometry. Like Groups or components also getting affected by orbiting, like view.suspend. They then become wireframe bounds.
And won't behave like normal even if turning the Tool off.

Maybe it has to do on amount of elements. So it's not dependent on how much space it takes up on the screen then. Which may influence the decision if one has to decide between showing wireframe OR Faces for performance reasons.

Hi.

Been pushing a Tools view.draw methods pretty hard and noticed that when exeding a certain
amount of geometry, BUGSPLAT!
Very consistently to.

After a lot of testing I found out it was the draw_lines method that was causing it.
Switching to GL_LINES solved the problem immediately and I could push it past the double of geometry without crash. Then other issues came along

Just a report.