its important to remember, that SketchUp only lets you print to scale, if you are in parralel projection mode.

so go to Camera > Parallel Projection. then use one of the standart views to make sure, you are aligned correctly to your model (or if your model isn't at a right angle to the original coordinate axes, right-click a face that you want to look straight onto and use the 'align-view' command).

if you now print (as Gaieus said: print as a pdf. thats ideal for furhter use in inDesign), you should be able to define the scale...

[Edit]
as far as I know the only way to export to scale, if you want to use the 'export 2d' function as opposed to the 'print' function is to export as dxf/dwg file. when you import these into inDesign, you will get the actual line work. the upside is, that you can change these lines at will (line weight, colour, etc). the downside is, that you won't get any coloured faces, textures or shadows...
[]

uh, thats bad!
actually, I still try to deny that hard discs just die after several years of intenseive use. its not pleasant, when the truth catches up with you...

you know whats the best thing about Wave?

the developer team loves the Firefly series!!!

well, thats reason enough for me to love Wave!

fantastic plugin, Chris. there are going to be a lot of funny spine images in the gallery section now...

just two minor suggestion/question: when running your script it asks you whether start and end of the curve are right. then it lets you define the parameters. that means you will always have to perform at least two clicks, even if the curve direction is correct.

therefore my question: is it possible to go straight to the dialog box, while labeling start and end of the curve and having a check-box for 'reverse curve'?
ideally the 'start' and 'end' labels would dynamically change, when ticking/unticking the check-box.

and secondly: could you make the script remember former input during a SketchUp session? (except for the 'reverse curve' check-box of course). that might speed up workflow as well.

@thomthom said:

In regards to CleanUp - it does have a function to smooth the geometry it cleans up. If you use CleanUp Entire Model you have a field "Smooth Edges by Angle".

yet another 'Doh'
I can put my Homer button to quite some use today

another one. after importing a messy 3Ds model and cleaning it up with Thomthoms cleanup-script (thanks again, thom), I started entering every single one of the over 1500 groups/components, to smooth their surfaces.

then I just discovered, that you can apply the smoothing to groups/components, without entering them. so you can select all the groups at once and only have to do the proces once! (doesn't work with nested groups though)

just cleaned up an imported model (from 3Ds Max).

cleaned up edges: 62.700
remaining edges: 84.300

your plugin rocks, thomthom

oh, that is a really bad one, Gaieus! I am not sure if I should burst with laughter , feel terribly sorry for you or just blush with embarassment, because that could just as well have happened to me

@diego-rodriguez said:

can you add, pushpull for multiple faces?

that would be great indeed. but I think a modifier key is unnecessary. simply apply the tool to more than one faces, if they have been pre-selected...

great suggestion. how did you do it exactly? can't seem to find an option to export it to kmz anymore...

that seems to be a great way to add detail like rust, stains, dirt...

but to actually wrap textures around an object it doesn't seem ideal to me...

@cadfather said:

Chris, at some point it may be useful to add 'stop playing the animation'

is it possible to change the play button to show a stop button when the animation is running?

come on whaat, enlighten us...
is looking really good, this one. just had a project where I was fighting with textures on organic surfaces...

or you can do it the dirty way...

create a component within the component. place this inner component on the correct layer. call the inner component by the correct name (e.g. toilet) and call the outer component something like 'toilet_container'.
now you've got everything you want:

• when hiding the layer 'toilets' all the toilet components will become invisible.
• if you check, how many of those toilets are in the model, it will show you the right amount
• when placing the component, you don't have to mess around with layers. they are already placed

there are two downsides though. firstly, you've got an unnecessary component in you browser (the 'toilet_container' component); and you actually have to expand your view in the component browser in order to see the ones you want, which clatters the browser with all the nested components as well. good thing is though, that it won't increase the file size too much, for the content of the container component is just another component.
secondly, if you press Ctrl + A to select everything within your scene, even with the toilet layer switched off you will select the container components (even if they are not visible). that may cause some unwanted deletions if you are not careful.

you could of course always explode the container components. but then its not too much of an effort to simply place the component on the right layer manually in the first place...

actually, there is a very simple explanation to that.

if you place a component in a model and then put it onto another layer, this information is applied to the 'outside' of the component, but doesn't affect it in any way. its pretty much the same when you apply a colour to a component.
lets say you've got five copies of the same component in your model. now you paint one of them bright red. only this one component changes the colour. if you want all the others to asume the same appearance, you have to enter the component and actually paint the content, not the component itself.

thats like if you've got 10 eggs. where you store those eggs (whether in a proper egg carton or in a velvet cloth) or if they have been painted for Easter... all that doesn't affect the eggs themselves...

so if you want the eggs to be red and wrapped in carton, you have to store them that way - a carton with red eggs inside.

or to translate it back to SketchUp: you have to store a component, with a group inside, thats painted red and placed on the desired layer...

I hope that made sense to you (and I didn't explain something that has been known already)

hey Chris. I am afraid, the buttons of the toolbar end up blank.

the zip file, you posted contains a ruby file called 'clf_center_on_origin.rb' and a folder with the Camera Recorder files.
within this folder there is the camera recorder ruby, several images and an empty folder called 'images'.
but no matter, where I placed the images (within the images folder. or the images folder directly in the plugins folder) it doesn't seem to be working

wow, that sounds brilliant, Chris. can't wait for the update! (would you mind posting the date of the update in the title of this thread? that makes it easier to check).

about the path editing thing: it probably doesn't make too much sense to edit the position points one by one (if you've got 24 fps, that would mean a lot of work).

one solution might be to employ fredo's cubic bezier curve (with the necessity of installing that plugin though) and place control vertexes at a chosen interval (like once per second, setting the precision of the curve to fill in 24 edges between the control points).
that would of course result in a smoothing of the path and might lead to unwanted results, when the camera motion changed speed quickly at some point (because then the bezier curve will create weird loops).

maybe there could be different options (the smoothed path output via cubic bezier curve or a true path output with every vertex unchanged (e.g. polyline)).

would definitely be interesting to see the influence of the smoothing process on the final output. might make the whole animation a bit nicer (like steady shot with physical camera). on the other hand one might lose the particular feeling of the 'handmade' animation...

I have to say I am really excited about this plugin! thank you so much Chris, for doing this

great little tool. now at last I can put my space navigator to some real use

I especially like the fact, that the plugin only saves the camera position and orientation, but ignores layer visibility, shadow settings etc. thus one can switch off everything that slows down the model, record the camera motoin, then switch on all the fancy stuff and export the animation.

I have got two ideas to make this tool truely powerful (kwistenbiebel would love it):

• option to export the camera motion as a path - camera path and target path, either with a vertex for every frame or as a 'smoothed' version via splines...

• a replay button to review the camera motion, ideally with the option to take changes to the camera path into account

like that one could create an animation (e.g. with space navigator) intuitively and then refine it manually by accessing the camera path...

really a great script.
just in case you get bored, TIG some suggestions for a RandomSelect 2.0:

• some sort of soft selection (selection of nearly 100% at the centre and 0% at the outer areas of a circle... or selection density gradually fading from one side to the other).

• or bitmap selection: load a bitmap file and use the grey values for selection density...

• several selection sets out of one selection: you select all the entities and then, using the script, select only lets say 25% of them. now you transform/move/paint them. then you click the selection button again and get the next 25% of the initial selection... and then the next 25%... and finally the remaining 25%...
  (at the moment I am using a hidden layer, moving the transformed entities to that layer after each step)

what do you think? usefull ideas?

sorry, don't really get what you want.
do you mean a plugin that stacks objects into a space the best way? (like an automated tool to pack the trunk of your car, when you go on vacation? that would be cool )

oh, and to make it the almighty super tool, you could enalbe push/pull of more than one selected face simulaneously, making it a lot faster to do extrude several faces with the sam distance (something that I always wanted the push/pull tool to be capable of)