Hello!
I have found myself in several circumstances where I wanted to match the volume of two components with different forms. Is there a plugin or other method that will scale a selected solid (component or group, I guess) to a specific volume?

For example: given a tetrahedron and a cube constructed of equal length vertices, the user could determine the volume of the tetrahedron with the entity info box, select the cube and click "scale by volume", enter the volume in VCB and convert the cube's volume to match the tetrahedron's.

This would be especially useful if it scaled around a central point.

I feel this would be useful as well for the growing number of sketchup users experimenting with 3d printing, where the amount of material used has significant cost and time impact.

Maybe such a thing exists! But I've not found it.
Thanks
magazine

Thanks for the response. Most flat map projections of the earth are unusual projections. Such as mercator or divided near the poles at the latitude lines. But, yes global maps with cities are pretty easy to come by. I've attached a good one for the use. Can you point me in the direction of wrapping it on a sphere?

Funny thing is that I would think that this is quite common - such as news bureaus would need a global 3d map with cities. But I guess most of those use google earth now.

Sorry for the size of the map!
Thanks

Hello All,
I am looking for a sketchup model (component, I guess) of the earth. While I've found a number of earth images from the 3d warehouse that include photographic textures, or models of globes, what I am looking for just is the shapes of the landforms, national borders and major cities. Oh, and I guess latitude and longitudinal lines.
Does anyone know where I can find such a model?
Thanks for considering the question.

Yes, there is always glue. I am definitely expecting to shore up these joints with glue if necessary.
I'm not an engineer, so I'm not sure if glue alone is a superior method of joinery with ABS. Do you think so? I would expect that a dowel that was then glued would work better. The snap idea came out of the possibilities of the material - really it seems like a component that could just be added to the edge of a wall or end of a protrusion, on which one could add another part. Both sketchup and 3d printing seem unusually appropriate tools for this kind of a feature. No connector? Just drop one on there before printing!

Also, I am trying to figure out the best way to use these materials and their potential. Since a print taking up most of the 6x6x8" bed is taking on the order of 30 hours; I kind of want to utilize the parts to their highest potential.

Has anyone seen anything like this out there in downloadable components? Anyone have further advice - would glue alone be superior? Or can anyone critique my designs?

Thanks!

snap connectors2.skpsnap connectors2.skpHello,
I recently have gotten access to use a 3d printer that makes parts out of abs plastic. Using this with sketchup is relatively easy, especially with plugins from folks like thom thom and fredo6. These have really made the process much smoother than it could be. Thanks to you guys.

Now, one of the drawbacks to 3d printing is the scale limitation. For me this is 6"x6"x8". It occurred to me that one way around this would be to use some kind of joinery. Such as mortise, dowel or other glued connection. Or snaps, like little kids plastic models.

Looking on the various sites for components to use this way didn't provide me with any results.

Does anyone out there know of where these could be found?
I've tried making my own, but they are not so great. I'll be trying to print them next week, but wondered if anyone had any suggestions about where to look. The file of snap/dowel connectors is attached.

I would think that many people had been confronted with this issue already - if I could snap together 6"x6"x8" parts, I could quickly be able to make things double or triple the scale.

Thanks in advance for any help!
Peter

Thanks Chris and Jeff,
I downloaded it again, and finally got it to work. For some reason it was automatically creating another folder within the clf_perpendicular_face_tools folder. So I guess it wasn't seeing the ruby.
Thanks much, It looks like this tool does exactly what I need.
Thanks for helping out someone getting started.
Brandon

Well,
I think there we have a difference of platforms. I'm on a mac and the plugins go in a folder under application support for Sketchup. I think I have it in the right folder.
When I open sketchup (upgraded to 7) I get the following message:

no such file to load -- clf_perpendicular_face_tools/clf_perpendicular_face_tools.rbError Loading File clf_perpendicular_face_tools_loader.rb
no such file to load -- clf_perpendicular_face_tools/clf_perpendicular_face_tools.rb

I'm really not sure what is happening. Also I tried another plugin on the forum, and it worked.
Thanks for any suggestions.
Brandon

Hi Chris,
Thanks for the response. It's odd, I got the plugin to download after re-registering.
But even when I put it in the plugins folder, it doesn't show up under my plugin pull-down menu.
Strange. I'm sure I'm doing something very stupid, but at the same time I've tried it different ways.
Any ideas? It certainly seems to be what I'm looking to do.
Thanks,
Brandon

Hi,
I'm a bit of a newbie. I have been trying for hours to produce a plane that is perpendicular to a line (a sight line actually). I tried to access your plug-in which seems to accomplish this task wonderfully, but it said I did not have permission. How could I get a copy? Thanks very much for the writing of the plug in.
Brandon