Wow guys!

Fast and to the point!
Thanks for sharing.

As I guess this subject may carry away more interest than I had estimated,
I'd like to extend it with a question:

Would it be possible for those that have specific insight and care to share it to include a SU file, be it even in part to illustrate?
I expect this to be a very welcome surplus for lots of peer SketchupIsta's

Thanks a lot already for the greatly appreciated answers till now!

Erwin

Hi there,

Not a total newbie, but certainly not an every day user of SU, I use SU in different situations.

• (quickly) sketch a situation to find out if an idea is feasible or not - and to also get a '3D' impression for myself, but also for others as to how a solution might look
• work out a drawing for our own house, still to be built

I've learnt a great deal from:

• Aidan Chopra
• Dennis Fukai
• this forum
• watching Nick Sonder's video-talks
  some more that I don't think of right now

How do you guys approach a drawing when you start out? To what detail will you go?
Or, how do you solve a lack of detail when you run into it?

More specific:
Suppose I want to draw a concept of our house, to see how it will fit. I could then start with a square, draw the wall thickness to another square, push pull it up and so forth.

as opposed to:
Draw each brick separately, and then build the walls using these bricks etc>

Where do you draw the line?
How do you go about? Start with little detail - then gradually as your project progresses get more and more into detail?
May be easy for you, but I find it really challenging..

Looking forward to your idea's & suggestions!

Erwin

Thanks for the tool!
I've been looking around for stair plug ins but could not find many. (1001bit but it does not contain L-shaped or quarter-turn stairs)
TIG,would you mind posting some links to the plug-ins you referenced?

Thanks a lot!

Erwin

Hi TIG,

Thanks a lot for your work!
I'm not sure if I follow all the way, but I have following question:
I'm looking for a way to incorporate GPS coordinate 'points' onto a geo-referenced houseplan. We need to set up a so called 'tree-plan' on which the surrounding trees are indicated.
My idea would be to 'import' the GPS location, then draw a circle with the approximate tree diameter.

Here's a link to an example map: http://www.natuurenbos.be/~/media/Files/Themas/Groen/Bomen/Bomenplan_ANB.pdf#page=33

Thanks a lot!

Erwin

OOPS!

Must have been late last night..
I see I missed 5 pages of posts..
It seems like what I ask is all there. I'll have a go at it and report back if I have any questions.
Thanks for your magnificent tools!!

Erwin

Edit; wow, does somebody read the FAQ???
You have a bright future here, my friend! (Just look at what our other moderator, solo has in his signature about this)
;)

As a matter of fact, I did search the FAQ, and it simply is not there (correct me if I'm wrong)Off course being the better than average user, I searched phpBB's faq for this... Hence..

Solo doesn't seem to have too much of a Stoppelbaard

Erwin

B.t.w How do I get URL's right??
That is: to not show up as the full URL, but as a 'clickable' word?
I've had a look [url]http://www.phpbb.com/community/faq.php?mode=bbcode/]here[/url], but this doesn't seem to work..
Allthough the one below DOES work ?

@unknownuser said:

Linking to another site
phpBB BBCode supports a number of ways of creating URIs (Uniform Resource Indicators) better known as URLs.

    * The first of these uses the  tag, whatever you type after the = sign will cause the contents of that tag to act as a URL. For example to link to phpBB.com you could use:

      [Visit phpBB!](http://www.phpbb.com/)

      This would generate the following link, Visit phpBB! Please notice that the link opens in the same window or a new window depending on the users browser preferences.

Erwin

@tig said:

I have fixed the problems with drawhelix13.rb.
It now allows turns that are not whole numbers...
Here it is[attachment=0:1sjnwqr5]<!-- ia0 -->drawhelix13_TIGd.rb<!-- ia0 -->[/attachment:1sjnwqr5]

Jeez, TIG you fix faster than I can think & write ))

Erwin

Hi TIG, thanks a tremendous lot for your input
Greatly appreciated (Gaieus too b.t.w)
I did explain the spiral stair stuff though, see herehttp://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=79&t=26214

I'll give your attachments a whirl soon and post back.
Although I must say my last experiments with Goh's toolkit are promising. (I've not found how to change direction of rotation clockwise/counterclockwise though)
One advantage I see in using Goh's plugin is that the treads are more detailed i.e. the outside of the tread are 'curved' instead of straight.

Nevertheless a couple of questions:
I'm native Dutch (Flemish) speaking, our stairmaker is French, and out here we're talking English, certainly with this kind of lingo I need some vocabulary help

Let me first paraphrase the layout of our stairs to be:
Hellicoïdal with hollow core with R=200 mm
Riser = 182,3 mm for V1
Riser = 189,2 mm for V2
Going = 230 mm (Giron in French)
LF = Ligne de foulée ~= "walkline" ~= plan-tread (??)
Plan-tread @ R = 650 mm -> V1 = 3/4T + 1/8T +107 mm
-> V2 = 3/4T - 70 mm

I really think, in conjunction with what I learnt from the stairmaker, the best way is to draft a plan and side view (like the picture I posted before), and build your model from there, as I also found in a post from TaffGoh here http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=79&t=12511

I must say, although the ruby depot is a tremendous help, it's lacking responsiveness, and certainly for newcomers, clarity and a little more context.
E.g. most rb-scripts are already several years old and have often already been improved upon or contained within newer / other ones. Also a minimal documentation including ONE picture would often help to at least give an impression of what it's all about.

One request remaining:
For clarity's sake and certainly for others researching this 'specialized' knowledge - would you mind drafting a quick SU image adding the lingo 'terms' to exclude misinterpretation?

Thanks again for this great and responsive forum and all the help!!

Erwin

Well, the pictures I posted are from the stairmakers website, so they don't correspond with our stair to be. We'd need to cover a height of 3100 mm in 17 treads, so each riser would need to be 182,35 mm. Also, there's something as the 'walkline' (translated literally, maybe it should be line of walk (?)) This line of walk would indicate that each tread be 230 mm across at a radius of 650 mm...
If I'm not mistaken you're thinkering of 16 or 18 to be a multiple of a pair?

Erwin

@gaieus said:

As I said, you can always break a helix - just like any other curve. I realise that these dimensions (324,xxx and 19,xxx degrees) are a bit "crazy" so to speak so I have been thinking hard how to achieve it (a simple segment count division would definitely not work - but it there were 18 treads and only 320 degrees, it would be easy).

I've been following the same line of thought..
I did the math with numbers I got from a professional stairmaker, but I would like to 'build' the model in SU
I have to admit: I can find my way around SU more than average after a couple of months of SU-ing and sipping Aidan Chopra's excellent video's, but crunching these ruby plugins is a complete other cup of beans!
I've also tried to add a couple of treads, just to have > 1, but no comma allowed..

I'd be glad to listen / read how you would go about with 17 treads and only 320 degrees...
Where would the difference be?

Erwin

Done some more playing with 1001bit tools from Goh, and I think this will fit the bill.
Will have to do extensive editing, but with drawhelix13.rb or spiralstair11.rb this would have to be done too anyway..

Would still be glad to see how to build a helix in less than a full turn

Final result would be something like these...

Erwin

Total of 324,431767 degrees
1 tread = 19,0842216 degrees

@tig said:

DrawHelix13.rb by Peter Brown 4/8/2004
has more options than that AND lets you do any number of turns...
http://www.crai.archi.fr/RubylibraryDepot/Ruby/drawhelix13.rb
Is this the one you are having problems with ?[attachment=0:59tf7bb0]<!-- ia0 -->drawhelix13.rb<!-- ia0 -->[/attachment:59tf7bb0]

Thanks for helping out.
I'm in need of this in order to draw a spiral stair.
But, I repeat, I CANNOT enter a value < 1 as a value for number of rotations ....

Now I do realize that with differing settings depending on localization sometimes a [.] becomes a [,] just like, apparently sometimes in VCB you have to enter either [,] or [;] to distinguish between entries.
In this case I've tried all of them...

No entry smaller than 1.
What am I doing wrong?

Gaieus, chopping would work I assume, but I need my spiral stairs to have 17 marches or threads (?) (not sure about the naming in English ) and they need to sum up to the total arc length of the helix to be drawn....

I'm not quite there yet...
Apparently you can't enter anything other than a full integer in number of rotations or section per rotation.

Erwin

@tig said:

Helix.rb lets you turn as much as you want ?

TIG, Thx for your prompt answer.
I've started out using drawhelix13.rb because the ruby depot announced it as an improvement over helix.rb (If I'm not mistaken)
Off I went to download helix.rb (http://members.cox.net/rick.wilson/links.html)
But....

I can only enter:
height: 3100mm
turns:???

If I enter a value < 1 I get an invalid integer error.
And I can't input any value for radius...

Are we talking about the same helix.rb?

Thanks for helping out!

Erwin

Hi forum,

I'm trying to draw a helix (using curvemaker):
radius: 900mm
from turn: 0.0
to turn: 0.901
sides/turn:17
Clockwise: yes
Curve origin: 0,0,0 mm
Height/turn: 3100

Somehow the result is not what I aim at
So I must be doing something wrong - but what?

Main question here, is where /how do I enter the (total) height?
Purpose is to have the helix at a total height of 3100 mm, it must have 17 sides, and it must have only complete 324.43 degrees of a full circle, hence my 0.90199114 (to turn).

When I input the above, the total height is something like 17553 mm...

I've also tried to achieve the same with drawhelix13.rb but there I can not input less than 1 full turn...

Any suggestion or help greatly appreciated!!

Erwin

curvemaker helix

Hi forum,

I'm looking to draw a spiral stair.
I've had a look at various videos, posts and tutorials.

Is there an easy way to draw an arc with a given center point, radius and arc-length?
It seems this is possible in SU Pro, http://sketchup.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=95592.
But is there a workaround or perhaps a plugin that can help achieve this?

Thanks for all your help and suggestions!

Erwin

TIG,

Thx!
That did the trick
Any idea how to get the Archiland plugin loading?
At the moment I have 2 ruby console items in my menu, and neither will open the console.

I don't see any item about archiland int the menu ...

Erwin

Hi forum,

This is my first post, so please bear with me
I'm using SU 6 & 7 on various machines.
Trying to build spiral stairs. I realize there are various posts covering this in this forum.
When I try to download spiralstairs11.rb from http://www.crai.archi.fr/RubyLibraryDepot/Ruby/em_arc_page.htm I get an error.
So I looked & found the script attached to some post, downloaded and saved in my plugin folder.
However, it does not seem to work.
I created 2 different helixes, one for the internal, one for the external helix.
Next I selected both, and chose Menu -> Plugins -> Spiral Stair
Then nothing happens.

I also had a look at the Ruby Console:

Error; #<NoMethodError; undefined method `curve' for #<Sketchup;;Group;0x3ba97f8>>
C;/Program Files/Google/Google SketchUp 6/Plugins/spiralstair11.rb;20;in `spiral_stair'
C;/Program Files/Google/Google SketchUp 6/Plugins/spiralstair11.rb;19;in `upto'
C;/Program Files/Google/Google SketchUp 6/Plugins/spiralstair11.rb;19;in `spiral_stair'
C;/Program Files/Google/Google SketchUp 6/Plugins/spiralstair11.rb;80
C;/Program Files/Google/Google SketchUp 6/Plugins/spiralstair11.rb;80;in `call'

So apparently there's some error.

Next I found archiland plugin (Sketchup.rb) that also seems to contain spiral stair. Also downloaded and in plugin folder. But I have no archiland menu...

Could someone give me a tip or point me to some documentation for this?

Thanks a lot!

Erwin