Posts made by Paul Russam

That's good to know, thanks.

As requested, here's DoorMaker and the description/how to guide.

Door Maker:
This is DoorMaker, a ruby script that as its name suggests creates doors.

Place the script doormaker.rb in your plugins folder, start
Sketchup and select DoorMaker from the Plugins menu

You will be presented with a dialog giving you many options,
I’ll work through them one by one but for now click OK and then
pick a point at which you want the door to be placed.
Hey presto you have a 910mm x 2100mm single door.

It looks a little odd as you appear to have 4 leaf’s, this is
intentional, each leaf is on a different layer, open up your
layers dialog and you’ll see that along with Layers0 you have
the following 05-D-Doors, 05-D-Leaf00, 05-D-Leaf30, 05-D-Leaf-60,
05-D-Leaf90 & 05-D-Swing. Try switching off Leaf00, Leaf30, Leaf90
and Swing. Your left with a door 60 degrees open.

All the individual groups are in a master group on the 05-D-Doors
layer so that you can switch on and off ALL the doors should you want to.
You’ll note that DoorMaker has drawn, what I call the SwingArc, this is
useful for when your producing plan views in 2D or perspective, this is on
the layer 05-D-Swing.

Why do all the layer start with ‘05’? I hear you say, well, When I’m building
I tend to layer my building like so: Walls, floor, Roofs etc. are on layers
starting with 01. Stairs, ramps etc on the 02’s and so it goes on. You can change
the ‘05-‘ to whatever you want and I’ll cover this in a bit.

DoorMaker creates upto 5 materials in the model Door-Frame, Door-Leaf,
Door-Fittings Door-Nameplate and Door-Glass. These are ready for you to
change to whatever you like be it white, be it wood, be it anything Sketchup
can create. I say upto because should you specify a door with, say no glass
elements then DoorMaker will not clutter your model with the unneeded glass material.

The frame’s profile is a simple rectangular one, this can be changed in the
dialog to 3 types, again I’ll cover this later

The door you’ve just created has a kicker plate on one side of the leaf and 2
handles, one on each side. These have the material Door-Fittings applied to them.

I use the terms Outward and Inward to describe which side of the leaf we are
talking about. Imagine you are standing in front of a door, Outward would be
as if the door is opening ‘Out’ from your position and Inward would be as if
the door is opening ‘In’ from your position.

I have assumed some defaults that can be changed by editing the script, all
the values used are at the beginning and you are free to change what you want.
Be warned though, should I release a revised script and you download it, it will
reset any values changed back to my defaults.

Now then lets work through the dialog:
Layer Root:
Here you can change that ‘05-‘ thing I was talking about earlier, It
you type in ‘Fred-‘ then your layers would be Fred-D-Door,
Fred-D-Leaf00 etc… so for example if you had 2 building on a site
you could have Bld1- and Bld2- as your layer roots.
Door Type:
Here you can select Single, Double or Door and a half, you’ll note
that Door and a half has 4 sizes 830mm,930mm,1030mm and 1130mm there
are the std. UK leaf sizes (let me know f this is wrong) The smaller leaf
is calculate as being the frame opening – primary leaf, so a 1450mm opening
with a frame width of 50mm and a primary leaf of 930mm would result in the
smaller leaf being 1450-50-50-930 = 420mm
Opening Width:
Here you type the structural opening width into which the door frame is to
fit (not the leaf size). We use mm in the UK so I assume that you would have
to append cm, m or ‘ for centimetres, meters or inches. – Defaults to 910mm
Opening Height:
As per Width but for the height. – Defaults to 2100mm
Frame Depth:
Here you specify the depth of the frame, normally it’s the wall thickness
but not always. – Defaults to 100mm
Frame Width:
Frame width is the thickness of the visible part of the frame. – Defaults to 50mm
Frame Profile:
Select Simple, Rebated or Rebate + Architrave. Simple is the above rectangular
profile, Rebated has the leaf rebated in to the frame by a preset 15mm. This make
the leaf 15mm taller and 30mm(15 each side) wider. Rebate + Architrave is the
same as Rebated but with the addition of architraves to cover the join between
the frame and the wall. The architraves are 15mm deep and the frame width
wide. – Defaults to Simple
Leaf Thickness:
Specify the thickness of the leaf here – Defaults to 40mm
Leaf Offset:
Here you can choose either Flush or Centred, Flush has the leaf position
to the back of the frame so that when its shut its ‘flush’ with the frame/wall.
Centred has the leaf centred in the frame no matter what the frame
depth. – Defaults to Flush
Panel Type:
This is where you can get a bit creative, There are 7 options here to
choose from: - Defaults to None

None:
Plain vanilla solid door leaf
VP Centred:
Create a 175mm wide glass opening in the middle of the leaf (or leaf’s
if it’s a double door) ,100mm from the top of the leaf and down to the
bottom of the pushplate(see later), the opening is rebated 15mm both
sides to create a d good look.
VP Offset:
Exactly the same as VP Centred but the opening is near the edge of the
leaf, enough leaf is left to allow a handle to be placed even if a
handle type is not specified.
1x1 Panel Glass:
1 big glass panel filling the leaf
1x1 Panel Solid:
As per the 1x1 glass but not ‘punched through’, thus leaving a
15mm recessed panel in the leaf
1x2 Panel Glass:
2 glass panels with the horizontal ‘split’ at the height of the handle.
1x2 Panel Solid:
As per 1x1 solid but 2 panels
Port Hole:
This gives you a round 300mm dia. Hole at 1700mm from the floor in the
centre of the leaf.

Kicker Outward
The kicker is the (usually) steel plate at the bottom of the door where
people ‘kick’ it open, DoorMaker places a 5mm thick plate 25mm in from the
edges of the leaf and 150mm tall on the Outward open side of the leaf – Defaults to ON

Kicker Inward:
As above but on the Inward side of the leaf – Defaults to OFF

Nameplate Outward:
This creates a 250mm x 75mm nameplate centred on the leaf at about
eye level on the Outward side of the leaf. If you specify any vision
panel and a nameplate the nameplate will not be created. – Defaults to OFF

Nameplate Inward:
As above but on the inward side of the leaf – Defaults to OFF

Handle Outward:
Here you have 5 options to choose from: - Defaults to Handle
None:
No handle of any kind
Handle:
Conventional handle at 1000mm from the ground
Plushplate:
85mm wide by 350mm tall 5mm thick plate, vertically
centred at 1000mm from the ground
Longbar:
1000mm tall 35mm dia. Vertical bar vertically centred at
1000mm from the ground
Panicbolt:
25mm dia. horizontal bar at 1000mm from the ground – as used
on emergency escape doors.

Handle Inward:
As above but for the inward side of the leaf, so you could have a
push plate on the outward and a longbar on the inward. – Defaults to Handle

SwingArc Style:
Chose from 3 options None, Single Swing and Double Swing. None is a bit
obvious, Single swing draws a 90 degree arc and Double draws a 180 degree
arc. The arcs are drawn 1mm above the floor level. – Default is Single Swing

Create/Use Default Materials:
This will instruct DoorMaker to create and use up 5 materials as mentioned
near the beginning of this document. Should you choose NO then DoorMaker
will use the default Sketchup materials (tan/blue) for all the elements.

Any values you type or options you select in the dialog stay selected throughout
you Sketchup session, Once you close Sketchup the values return back to their defaults.

Although I’ve put in a number of ‘error catchers’ such as:
Don’t do a vision panel unless the leaf is wide enough.
Draw the porthole at 1700mm from the ground unless the
leaf isn’t tall enough, in which case draw it XXXmm from
the top of the leaf.
I cannot cater for every eventuality, It is perfectly possible to create
a door 300mm wide with a leaf thickness of 200mm and a frame depth of
2000mm….. but why would you????

Have fun and feel free to point out any errors or wishes.

%(#FF0000)[Now updated to suit v2014 by TIG.
Please get the latest version from the SketchUcation PluginStore] http://sketchucation.com/pluginstore?pln=DoorMaker

Done a quick 'How-To' over lunch, hope its clear enough:

HowTo-Road Markings - SKP File

We need an emote for 'bangs head of desk'

I never knew we could do this in SU, I've been selecting faces and picking soften/smooth edges from the context menu.

This is what I love about SU and here, always something new or a new way to do something.

Very effective, I did a couple just for a test:

OK, here goes with my first (EVER) tutorial.

Its not complete yet.
I'm posting it here so I can get comments from your good selves on whether its going in the right direction, readable, understandable etc.

Writing is not one of my strong suits so any hints, pointers etc. would be welcome.

EDIT:
Final tutorial linked here (from later post below)

urgen,
That's a fantastic resource, thanks.

Heres another good one:
http://www.accustudio.com/exchange/textures.php?dir=

Done

Paul Russam

Didier,
Yep that did it.

Just reading this topic and I to get no PM button for Didier, I checked the Member List like Todum did and both Didier and Stu's PM buttons are absent.

Here's a list of who's PM button is missing (for me)
47 Didier Bur
59 Stu Mayhew
191 trufel
402 tuzzi2
578 spire7k
719 diana
1224 Nicole
1260 2mv
1565 sparky4945

For those that don't know about this, here's Adobe's Kuler.
Its a very easy to use colour mixer/arranger.

http://kuler.adobe.com/

Russam!!!!

Here Sir

I'm working on a massive light industrial/commercial site at the mo and will soon need the following:

A euro style (Cab over) arctic, flat bed or box.
(I can easily make an 18ton'er by messing with the axle's.)
I also need a transit van sized er.... van.
and anything else, vehicle wise, you can think of that would be suitable.

Thanks