Is it in the grey zone to ask whether someone might share their license with us? Since the author has closed the homepage and discontinued support, isn't it some kind of abandonware?

I am an avid user of this plugin, and there is nothing that quite compares to it. Have tried several different tree generators on other platforms, but this one has a certain charm.

Wow, that is really exciting! Looking forward to trying it! And I am sure that it will have several uses beyond shaku, I heard they use a plethora of units in India, otherworldly yet widespread units like the angula purportedly equivalent to eight barleycorns side by side.

We were typing replies at the same time, so I didnt see your most recent answer. I am very happy that you tried to implement a shaku feature. I think that a Webdialog that pass on values to the VCB would be great! If it can work simultaneously with the currently selected tool, I would be thrilled. Maybe someone have had a go at such a thing, I will look into it myself too.

I greatly appreciate your answer, Dan, and I suspected it might be difficult, though I am sure we agree that it seems a rather basic feature for a drafting program to have.

Your method would be more reliable than my current workflow. However, there are complications. In Japan, as extensions and facilities are added to traditional buildings, they are normally made by the new standard, ie millimeters. And so, the drawings will sometimes contain both millimeters and shaku. And in my particular field of work, sometimes even feet and inches are used too. So sometimes there will be measures of inches, millimetres and shaku in the same single drawing. And so scaling in the end will be cumbersome as I have to keep track of which elements are drawn in what units, then scale them independently and realign them manually.

I was wondering if there were a method to interfere with inputs in the measurements, so e.g. if you were to press CTRL-Enter rather than Enter after typing a shaku dimension in the VCB, it would automatically convert the dimension to the standard unit before passing it on to the tool? I guess it would be very difficult to implement it application wide, I suspect it might be impossible, but if so is there perhaps another way? Any crazy idea will do.

I have a thinking challenge. I work on many traditional projects in Japan, and very often I have to draw in units based on the measure "shaku". By todays standard 1 shaku equals 303mm.

The way I do it now I draw everything in mm and scale it afterwards, but I was wondering if there was a way to create a custom unit in Sketchup. If it is not possible in a conventional manner, a hack will do too. Just some way of drawing in custom units.

Can anyone help me come up with a solution? Can it be done by intervening with some kind of observer? Any ideas are greatly appreciated, and I am sure other people too might want to draw in custom units.

Thank you for your suggestion.

I have however in increasing desperation and frustration found a solution that seems to work.

Downloaded a trial version of Deep Exploration, a notorious 3d conversion program. To my great surprise it does the job very fast! Opening my very complex model takes about 3 minutes, but then exporting a pdf or ai files takes about 30 seconds. And judging from what I have seen so far, the output is flawless. Literally tens of thousands of lines are outputted almost instantly. I am happy!

So this is just an advice for other users with the same demands I have. Deep Exploration seems to be able to do it.

I am wondering if anyone has some ideas for how to select entities in view. I am guessing Thomthom may have brilliant ideas...

I am almost suffering of OCD when it comes to detailing models, something which, unfortuntely, my clients applaud. So I do hidden line drawings with lines for textures, kind of like hatches... yes I draw wood grain too, thats just how anal I am.

So anywho, when exporting pdf or eps of views of these ludicrous models, it sometimes takes hours, with a constant fear of cpu meltdown as the fans spin at 100db...

I found out that it is because Sketchup has to explode everything before it can export the graphics.

So I thought (and this is the short version):

What if I could select only the geometry in the current view, copy it, make a new model and paste it and then from there export the graphics. Yes I could do that manually by using the selection box, but I want to select the geometry inside groups and components, something that I know ruby can do.

Yet, how do I go about it, any ideas? And is my theory of this method combatting cpu fatigue feasible, or do you think I am a looney? I will greatly appreciate any input.

The problem is that if I export a 3d dwg, it will only open in top view in Illustrator. Exporting a 2D dwg is just as painful as exporting a PDF, probably because Sketchup has to translate all that 3d data into a 2d representation, meaning it has to explode all components and stuff, though I am just guessing.

Is there perhaps a possibility of some program accepting a skp file and being faster than Sketchup to make a PDF from a view. I wonder if a program like Vectorworks might be faster?

Well, there is one way, but it is not pretty, it is not polite and it is very tedious, and if your not very techy it might even be impossible.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ogle/

OGLE captures OpenGL streams and saves them as a .obj files. If you use it with GE you will get an output which is usable, but to get it to be useful you have to be very patient and enthusiastic. There are many guides around the net for how to use it. It worked for me, I got a whole mountainside neighborhood of buildings successfully from GE to Sketchup. But it was not easy.

I have an increasingly large model that will be used as basis for line drawings to be touched up in Illustrator.

The model now has 3M lines and 0.5M faces, and it is almost done. It is a very modular thing so almost all of it is component instances.

Now, when exporting views to PDF it takes ages for it to handle. Sometimes it wont finish after an hour and by that time my computer fan is running at 100db, and I worry to do permanent damage to my tired precious laptop.

So I was wondering, are there workarounds to getting a PDF out of Sketchup? And I mean a vector PDF, not bitmap.

I would be very happy to get any tips for a better approach. How do you do it?