@Dave-R said in Sketchup and Miniature Modelling STLs:

The alternative is to do what it does manually

Or maybe just use the free Universal Importer, which is perfectly compatible with Sketchup Make 2017 and it also include a robust decimation functionality powered by the MeshLab engine?

Universal Importer | SketchUcation

3D SketchUp Community for Design and Engineering Professionals.

(sketchucation.com)

@Rich-O-Brien said in Ferrari F2004:

The GOAT

Indeed.

@EricBreuerDesigns said in Toposhaper:

I am having difficulty finding

Use the link provided by Rich and just hit download

@Rich-O-Brien said in Ferrari F2004:

Love the heat haze!

It's actually pretty simple and nearly physically based.
After quite a lot of overcomplicated experiments, I came up with something really simple and actually pretty effective that renders super-fast and works at every viewing angle with zero postproduction needed.

This is the final version.
I made a smooth lowpoly volume for the wawe and linked it to the main car rig (which is actually animated in order to get physically accurate motion blur and panning effect).

The base material is just "clean air"

• no diffuse/albedo
• no specular reflection
• no normal/bump/displacement whatsoever
• fully refractive
• base IOR = 1

You'd say: "Nice, a useless material which basically does nothing applyed to a useless mesh which is basically invisible".

But then there's the crucial trick.

• I plugged a map in the IOR slot of the material with a multiplier of 3.
  Basically the map acts as a mask telling Vray: "When the pixel is full white display IOR 3 (heavy distortion), when the pixel in the mask is full black, fallback to the base material IOR (which, as we said, is 1 so 0 distortion), if it's some grey interpolate accordingly between the two"
• the map itself is a composite map (blended in overlay mode to keep the dark part and the light part, while applying a bit of contrast)
• the main turbulence effect blended in the composite IOR map is some kinda procedural fractal/turbulence noise (greyscale)
• the second map blended in is another procedural map with some "custom inverted fresnel law". Basically a view-based fall-off driven by a linear curve graph which interpolates between white when camera rays are perpendicular to the suface of the wawe mesh, while gradually fades toward black when camera rays hit the mesh at increasing angle. This actually gives the smooth transition at the edge of the wawe object at any viewing angle (without it, the thing would look as a slab of unreflective frosted glass or something like that)

@Rich-O-Brien said in Ferrari F2004:

Flashback to Schuey giving Barichello the win at Indianapolis

Actually that one was two years before, but yeah, definitely that render was meant as a tribute to that legendary shot... of course you nailed it, as opposed to an architect on the Italian SketchUp community who said, when I originally shared the renderings: "Nice, but you absolutely need to remove that brick material thing which is ugly, out of context, doesn't make sense and completely ruins the shot"

@pixelcruncher said in Ferrari F2004:

Nice! What tool did you use to create these renders?

Vray GPU 4.3.1 (in 3dsMax).
Max was used also to model the water puddle and the water droplets in the 1st image (about 3.5 millions vertices) and the heatwawe volume (really lowpoly just to hold the refractive material) in the 5ft and 6th image.
Everything else was done in Sketchup.

said in Ferrari F2004:

I posted some still renders at this link.

Unfortunately my Facebook profile is down due to a false positive for "Advertisement Cybersecurity" (never did a single "Ad" in my life, but.. yeah).

While I wait to see if eventually their stupid AI bot their "assistance team" will restore it, I'll repost the original renders here.

@utiler said in VRay won't recognize studio license:

I did log in to Trimble Connect andclieck My Products which is where I downloaded the VRay file to load which I have done

Silly question (but this is an error that I myself actually did in the past, so..)
After that, did you make sure that in Chaos login you used the "login with Trimble" option and not the "Login with Google" or something like that?

@ntxdave if you don't need the full pro Photoshop experience, but you want a free clone (which allows you to follow along most basic Photoshop tutorials) you can also give a try to https://www.photopea.com/

It will work in your browser (kinda like SketchUp free does) and doesn't need an account.
You can also install it locally if you prefer.

Well, you said that:

@L-i-am said in Thinking of our Majid today:

I think that anyone who does not see that Europe is being invaded by a group that has no chance of integration is misguided and irrational

And I have to disagree. The official numbers are those I reported and believe me the reasons for the rage against government you are talking about raise from the problems which I listed, rather than the "invasion".

@L-i-am said in Thinking of our Majid today:

Italians have a history of dissatisfaction with Government

This is absolutely true but again: this has nothing to do with some imaginary "invasion".
It's mostly related to a few real problems.

My perception, based not on graffiti or a certain type of foreign press, but on the fact that I was born and lived here all my life, is that the top ten reasons are the following (aside from the ones I mentioned, which are indirectly the cause of most of the others):

• corrupt politicians
• mafia
• half the population pays extremely high taxes because the other half evades them
• half the population retired under the old laws under 40, and the other half will have to work until they're over 70 under the new laws to pay the pensions of those others
• non-existent industrial policies and avalanches of public money given away to companies like Fiat and Alitalia, who ate it up and then went abroad
• high unemployment and low wages
• high inflation and constantly rising prices
• if you book a medical appointment at a public facility, the first available date is in 6 months (or in more than a year for particularly specialized visits)
• uncontrolled car traffic, poor public transportation, and Unreliable and potholed roads, delayed trains.
• Poor management of public waste collection

@Mike-Amos said in Thinking of our Majid today:

In this case Greece and parts of Italy.

I live in that part of Italy and I have to partly disagree.
Regardless the storytelling about that, by no means that's the main problem we have to face.
To be fair, we have 1 illegal immigrant for every 100 people, we have 15 people who are basically fascists for every 100 people, we have 36 functional illiterates for every 100 people, not to mention that we have 100 members of parliament with some kind of criminal record out of 600.

I eventually found this post.
I was curious about it, but for some reason the download link in this banner
points to a completely different plugin which is something that probably @rich-o-brien should address.

@jczt said in [RELEASE] Smart Spline: A new organic drawing tool for professional workflows:

Feedback : I am now looking for technical feedback from the SketchUcation community to refine the tool

Here you go, I tested your tool in multiple SketchUp versions:

• Studio 2026
• Pro 2021
• Make 2017

Here are my first impressions and some advice as someone with quite a few of experience in beta testing stuff

General idea: I love the overall concept that you are trying to achieve in developing a clean, simple tool for something like this.
I feel that this one is positioned somewhere in between the rudimentary/obsolete/limited/unintuitive Beziere Tool from SketchUp Team and the most advanced, but indeed more complex to use tools from Fredo such has BeziereSplines or FredoSplines (my personal favorite).
This could be a good choice for people trying to achieve smooth shapes easily without having to learn all the different parameters and options of the full-fledged existing Fredo's alternatives.
Of course this comes with quite a few limitations in therms of control and non destructiveness, so you may want to find a sweet-spot somewhere in between, but this had to be expected, I guess.

Compatibility: I saw that you listed compatibility for Sketchup 2022+, but actually it's perfectly compatible with 2017-2021 (and probably even older versions which I didn't test).
The only problem, as you will see in the attached screenshots, is that the toolbar is created with an empty icon (still functional).
I guess that's because you only included an svg icon.
That could be easily fixed adding a couple of png icons and a method to check the SketchUp version and use those as a fallback if current version doesn't support svg icons.
Why this matter: your tool could be way more popular if you add full support for SU2021, which was the last version with perpetual license, not to mention SU2017, which of course was the last version usable for hobbyists.
Cutting off such a huge potential user-base just for the sake of an icon.. you are shootin yourself in your own foot IMHO.

Intuitiveness/usability: the tool is objectively really straightforward and easy to use. Just a couple of notes:

• In the vast majority of 3d tools that I used in my life, the expected/industry-standard behavior is that the "Esc" key is used to undo the last spline point.
  I tried that out of habit and my spline was gone. Then I figured out that the "Esc" key is to undo the whole operation and start over, while the Backspace is to undo the last control point, but I had to look at the status bar to acknowledge that. And that leads to the next point.

• The status bar is in French.
  I did a bit of research and my suspect was confirmed: French is not a language that 96% of human being can understand.
  That's why I had to try a couple of option to find out what the heck "Echap" means.
  And of course, in compliance to the Murphy's Law, it was not "Del/Canc", which is the next one I tried, but it was Backspace instead.
  I'd recommend to stick with English, at least as an option.

• I get the point that you don't want to over-complicate your tool (and probably your life), and overall you went with a nice, robust all-rounder option
  for your math (I guess it's a Catmull-Rom, or Hermite or whatever quite predictable and reliable local fit spline you are using), but I believe that (just for advanced users) you could include at least an option to control the tension and another option to create a cusp/split tangents (this kind of additions could be "transparent" and not interfere with the basic users workflow, if you put let's say degree/tension as an optional VBC formula and maybe Shift+Click to split tangents).

• It's nice to have snaps, but sometimes could be useful to disable them (You could use Alt key to cycle between different modes, like the native Sketchup pencil does, or maybe TAB). On the other hand, tapping right/left/up arrow keys to toggle axis constraint could be a nice addition. I think that those option would not ruin the "minimalistic" approach of the tool, being that they would just mimic SketchUp native behaviours.

Problems/bugs:

Problem #1 (usability)
I noticed a thing: your spline is very "geometry dense" to say the least.
Regardless the size and the curvature, the tool adds 120 segments for each node that you draw.
This leads to an INSANE amount of vertices if you need to trace a complex path (see the example below).

Of course an advanced user can still tackle this using Edge Tools, Curvizard, or something... BUT, since you are looking for users who dont't want to mess with complex tools and parameters, then I believe you should take this into account, in order to protect monkeys from themselves avoid them to get in troubles.

That, again, could be easily managed in vcb (using the same native formulas of arcs and circles with a lower default value) and could be perceived as something familiar from the average Sketchup user.
I suggest to add a "Num s" option or something in vcb to adjust the spline precision.

Problem #2 (cosmetics/glitches)
As you can see in the next screenshot, orbiting the model can cause the spline preview to be clipped. I can steadily reproduce the glitch in this model.

Fun fact: as you can see, I encounter this problem only in Sketchup Studio 2026. I cannot reproduce it in SketchUp Make 2017, despite the fact than in 2026 I'm drawing from a decent point of view, while in Make 2017 I'm trying my best to trigger it, even moving the camera closer and intentionally cutting the spline out of the viewport as you can see in the following screenshot.

I'll investigate more on this and see if can isolate the problem better, in order to maybe help you to find the cause (and hopefully the solution).

Problem #3 (undesirable/potentially dangerous behavior)
While I was randomly playing around with the tool, I hit my right mouse button by mistake and I noticed that, not only I selected an unwanted object, but also that the context menu was triggered.
My first reaction by instinct was to quickly hit the Esc key in order to close the annoying popout. This of course closed the unwanted menu, but at the same time completely destroyed my spline. (Ctrl+T doesn't deselct stuff while the tool is active)

Of course this is an edge-case, but at the end of the day this is what beta testing is all about, isn't it?

At first I tried to do the same with FredoSplines for direct comparison and it was triggering his proper context menu.
So my first thought was that the problem is specific to your tool, but then I realized something that I never noticed in more than 15 years (that's one for the Doh' Book): basically every single Sketchup Tool which doesn't happen to have it's own context menu falls back to the Sketchup default right click behavior, and this can potentially cause problems.

When I realized this, I was like: "Oh, sh°t.. let me doublecheck if the tool I'm developing is doing the same" ...and IT WAS.
And I discovered that this also open the possibility to launch options from the context menu which potentially break tools.
In my case, I was able to explode a subgroup, while the tool was active, completely destroying the full undo stack of the tool.
NICE ONE.
All in all, my random mistake with your tool was an "happy accident" because it gave me the opportunity to learn something new about Sketchup in general..

So I tried a few methods with the robot (by no means I'm a programmer, I'm using AI to code stuff) and none of the proposed solution worked.
Apparently, if you just try to intercept the right click/context menu and tell Sketchup "I'm taking care of this, don't interfere", but then you don't do nothing.. Sketchup will fallback to his default behaviour no matter what.

Then I had an idea and asked the robot to create a fake context menu with a dummy entry greyed-out just for the sake of stealing focus from the default SU context menu.. and it somewhat worked, see below.

This is the pseudo-code extracted from the solution that I came up with.
I would be curious to know what actual developers like @tig, @fredo6 and @thomthom think about this solution, if it's robust enough, or may cause collateral problems (apparently is safe, at least for my use-case) and most importantly, if this can be done better

#==============================================================================
# HOW TO BLOCK SKETCHUP DEFAULT CONTEXT MENU IN YOUR CUSTOM TOOL
#==============================================================================
# Problem: When your tool is active, right-clicking shows SketchUp's default
#          context menu (with Erase, Explode, etc.) which can:
#          - Confuse users (entities appear selected but aren't)
#          - Break undo stack if operations are executed
#          - Interfere with tool's selection logic
#
# Solution: Implement getMenu() method in your Tool class and populate it
#           with a dummy entry. Returning true with EMPTY menu causes SketchUp
#           to show default menu as fallback. Populating prevents fallback.
#
# Where to add: Inside your Tool class (the class passed to model.select_tool)
#==============================================================================

# Example: Your existing Tool class structure
class YourCustomToolInstance
  
  def initialize
    @tool_active = false
    # ... your initialization code ...
  end

  def activate
    @tool_active = true
    # ... your activation code ...
  end

  def deactivate(view)
    @tool_active = false
    # ... your deactivation code ...
  end

  # ==========================================================================
  # ADD THIS METHOD TO BLOCK DEFAULT CONTEXT MENU
  # ==========================================================================
  
  # Override context menu to prevent SketchUp default menu.
  #
  # Called by SketchUp before showing right-click context menu.
  # Populating menu with dummy entry prevents SketchUp from showing
  # its default menu (which includes Erase, Explode, etc.).
  #
  # @param menu [UI::Menu] Context menu object
  # @return [Boolean] true to indicate menu was handled
  #
  def getMenu(menu)
    if @tool_active
      # Add grayed-out entry to block SketchUp default menu
      item = menu.add_item("⚠ YourToolName Active - Right-click Disabled") {}
      menu.set_validation_proc(item) { MF_GRAYED }
      return true
    end
    false
  end
  
  # ===========================================================

Oh, and last but not least... Yes: is THAT model.
I forgot about it until today.
I did it relatively quickly (I remodeled it at maybe 80% in a couple of hours when you gave me the base scan and then refined and textured it in the very same weekend, adding the surrounding and the printable version). I planned to share it, with proper credits to you, also in the graffiti LOL.
But before sharing I wanted to test the printable models (I did both a fdm and a resin version), but my friend which owns the printers was not available at the time.
So it went straight in my rather large "99% complete - abandoned models graveyard"

More on that here

@alexpacio2013 you could try to create a ruby custom toolbar button with that command, usually that's the equivalent of launching a command from the console itself.

@jo-ke said in Modelling a tramway:

Im former times (15 years ago) we had something like speedmodelling- challenge

I miss that.
It was super fun.

@tilo-mar-tin it's not dead. The site doesn't offer secure connection and your browser is locking it.

@FlorinAp
You can probably modify that using Claude.ai which is pretty capable of editing ruby scripts for Sketchup, as long as you are accurate enough in the description of the changes that you need in the code.
That said, I recommend to be really careful when you mess with plugin logic.

Looking at the example in the image above, the shape clearly looks created using SubD.

• If you create the construction geometry inside the group, it will be destroyed (regardless that you put in another layer or not) whenever you toggle the subdivisions.
• If you create the construction geometry it in a nested group, subdivision will not work anymore, due to the nested instances "illegal" condition.
• The cleanest (and the only working) solution would be creating a father group with 2 subgroups inside (one for the subdivision geometry and one for the construction geometry), but then you need to open the father group whenever you need to edit the subdivisions.

It's something that probably is better managed grouping the construction geometry manually depending on what you are trying to achieve in a given situation rather than having it hardcoded all the times.

If you hardcode it in the plugin, probably it could be handy in some situations, but will be more cumbersome in other situations.

Please notice that in order to achieve the same result you could look into Fredosketch plugin or Axyz plugin.
Both of them share an inbuilt logic for bounding box snapping.
Each of them has its advantages in therms of usability.

• Fredosketch can be quickly launched pressing "M" key shortcut twice in order to replace the Sketchup native move tool when needed.
• Axyz allows moving with a gizmo, and also has an option to enable/disable the bounding box preview.

Both of them can do a lot more.
I recommend taking a look at both before messing with code on this one.

I often find myself in this situation when my partner is away for a few days. Then when she comes home she tries to kill me.

@Rich-O-Brien said in EasyOffset / my new plugin #3:

I break spaghetti before I cook it

[TriggeredItalianModeON/]That should be illegal[TriggeredItalianModeOFF/]

@Rich-O-Brien said in EasyOffset / my new plugin #3:

I'm gonna try a break it

Did you check your inbox? There's more stuff to break.

@joshvt said in shortcuts not retained in 2026 when Sketchup restarts:

I'm not even sure why they need a shortcut to Exit

Agreed. Moreover it's redundant with Ctrl + F4 which is standard for Windows.