How did you then reconstruct the cylinder? Did you have to fold each segment manually, or do I misunderstand? Is it perhaps only the textures that get unwrapped?

Guess I will have to give it a try.

I am not bitching. I am posting comments that may be useful to other users. I have installed lots of plugins and they have all installed directly. I do not do it blindly. I open the zip file and look at what it contains first.

I have also managed to generate a bug splat with the tool, by following the instructions like a dumb user. (Sketchup 7)

I created a simple cylinder. I then selected the entire model and clicked Index Edges. Nothing happened. I thought it had not worked. (A message is needed down the bottom saying it worked.)

With the entire model still selected I picked the Unfold tool and clicked on the model. BUG-SPLAT. Does it every time.

I finally did it properly and it works like a dream. I wanted to explode the cylinder so I could texture the curved surface with 4 separate textures. (UVTools only does one texture.)

Now what? How to I re-assemble the cylinder again? I can obviously do it manually but I was hoping for an option that would automatically put the model back together again.

One other minor issue. After install all of my toolbars were splattered all over the screen and I had to rearrange them. (I use the plugin that allows you to customise the toolbars. Can't remember what it is called.)

A summary of my suggested improvements to what is a great plugin:

1. Separate the Mac and PC install files

2. Modify the paths within the zip file so it can be unzipped directly into Plugins directory like almost all other plugins.

3. When Index Edges is used, put a message down the bottom saying "Edges Indexed".

4. Fix the bug splat when model is clicked with the Unfold tool with entire model selected.

5. Fix a bug with unfolding multiple faces. I selected half a dozen faces of the cylinder with the select tool then changed to the unfold tool and clicked on the next un-highlighted face. They were unfolded but were not joined together. They were separated by an increasing amount of space between them. The first time I did it I clicked on one of the highlighted faces by mistake. They ended up spread all over the place.

6. Put tooltips down the bottom when a tool is selected and after each step telling dumb users like me what to do next. If the tool is used constantly it becomes intuitive but for a user who maybe uses the tool once a year they have to go back to the web site to find out how to use it.

7. Add an option to re-assemble the model back to its original state, either fully automatically or one step at a time similar to the unfold process. The tool is great for things other than metalwork and paper folding etc. It can also be used for texturing difficult surfaces, but re-assembly is then required.

I tried the Flattery plugin. It works fine to unwrap the cylinder out to a flat plane. It is then a trivial matter to texture each group of 8 segments so the entire cylinder is textured perfectly with the 4 individual textures.

Problem is there is no option to put the model back together again, so that becomes a manual process. Not too difficult however. I have suggested on the Flattery topic that such an option would be nice.

If I am not mistaken I believe the zip file has been created incorrectly. Firstly as the other user pointed out it contains both the Mac and PC files, making it impossible to do a standard unzip without getting all of the files.

Secondly the directory structure is incorrect. To do a standard unzip on most plugins you simply tell winzip that the Extract-to folder is plugins and you tick the "use folder names" and everything works.

When you do that with Flattery.zip you get an incorrect directory structure set up. You get a high-level folder within the Plugins directory called Flattery (with a capital F). Within that folder you get the flattery.rb file and README.txt. The flattery.rb should be in plugins, not Flattery.

You also get two other folders, called flattery and .svn, within the Flattery directory.

If you open the zip file and look at the right hand column you will see the problem. The flattery.rb file has a path of "Flattery". It should have no path at all if it is supposed to go in the Plugins directory. All the other files have a path of Flattery/flattery. They should just say flattery...

Another problem is that the README.txt is ends up in the high-level plugins directory. It should be in the flattery directory, or should be called "flatteryreadme.txt" or similar. Unzipping a file called readme.txt to the plugins directory, that may contain hundreds of plugins, is a bit meaningless.

I recognise that a user would normally only need the readme initially, but a standard user doing a standard unzip is going to end up with the readme.txt in the plugins folder, probably overwriting an existing file of that name from another plugin.

The way this zip file has been set up I presume it is designed to be unzipped to C:. It would then create a directory called Flattery. The user would then have to move all its contents to Plugins, and then delete the Flattery directory. That is not intuitive and is not what the install instructions say.

The other issue is the .svn folder. What is it? The install instructions mention nothing about it but it seems that it has to go in the plugins root directory.

Actually totally impossible. There is no combination of pixels that will exactly match the shape of the 8 segments hence the process of applying the texture to the first segment, sampling then applying to the next can never work. Unless there is some black magic in there that I am unaware of.

Make texture unique reduces the quality of the texture badly and also shifts the texture several pixels left. It does not give a seamless result.

As for the suggestion of making the texture the same shape, that is impossible. Let's say the texture is 1024 pixels wide by 673 pixels high. Each segment of the cylinder is 1.3762m wide by 2.7643m high. What shape should I make the texture so it fits exactly?

Rather than guessing can I ask you to draw a 32-sided cylinder and try to manually paint 8 sides of it with any texture so the ends match up exactly with the ends of the 8 segments.

Unfortunately that that won't work either. When you sample each of the 8 segments you get the exact same texture each time.

@roger said:

... Then you take the eye dropper tool and sample the texture on the 1st segment and then paint the second segment, then you sample the second segment and paint the third segment and just keep repeating the process all the way around the cylinder. The texture will smoothley wrap all the way around as shown in my sample. When done unhide hidden geometry and lock the cylinder.

Unless I am missing something, that should be it.

It would be nice if it was that simple but it is not. Each 1024-byte wide texture has to be painted on 8 segments. You take the first texture and paint it on the first segment, then sample and paint the next etc. When you get to the 8th segment there is no way that the texture will finish with pixel 1024 exactly at the final edge of the last segment. Not even vaguely close. You can repeat and repeat the process as much as you like, shrinking and enlarging the texture horizontally, and it will never match up exactly. Therein lies the problem.

It is even worse than that. Let's say the texture ends up too short. So you go back to the first segment and stretch the segment horizontally a bit. You then re-paint it on segment 2. It does not retain the same stretch. It reverts to the original horizontal width, so you can in fact never achieve the desired result by trial and error.

@roger said:

Don't understand the need for a plugin to wrap a texture on a cylinder. Use the texture tool.

Could you elaborate please on how exactly one can use the texture tool to texture a 32-sided cylinder with 4 individual textures each 1024 bytes wide, such that the textures meet exactly at each intersection and wrap the cylinder completely.

Thanks a lot for the suggestions. I will give them a try and see how they go.

I don't really want to export to other software. A plugin to explode the cylinder out to a flat plane (retaining all the hidden lines) is all I really need. I can then just apply the 4 textures to the 4 groups of 8 faces. I then need to wrap it all back up into a cylinder again. I did a few searches for such a plugin but was not sure what to search for.

The texture is 4096 x about 500 pixels high. The cylinder is 10.2m in diameter and 3.5m high.

I need to texture a very big cylinder with a texture that is 4096 bytes wide. The cylinder has 32 segments. If I shrink the texture to 1024 pixels wide, so that I can use UV Tools cylindrical mapping, the texture is too blurry. I have therefore broken the texture into 4 equal sections. Problem is how to texture the cylinder accurately with it.

The solution I used was to break the cylinder into 4 quadrants with hard lines, remove each quadrant, flatten it out into a plane by rotating each of the 8 faces out flat, texturing the resulting rectangle, then painstakingly moving each surface back onto the cylinder and rotating it back into place.

So two questions. Is there anything like UV Tools that would do that automatically. If not, is there a plugin to flatten out a cylinder, then wrap it back up again please?

Afraid it is still not working. The dimensions are now more self-explanatory but the From x and To x still do not work.

I drew a catenary 500m long x 100m high, then edited the catenary and said I wanted From x to be -100. It cut the catenery in half so it started at the middle bottom.

I pressed enter several times to get back to From x. It said -2.54m. I tried to enter -100 again but it would not let me. I then entered -1. It accepted that. I pressed enter to go around again, but when I got back to From x it then read -0.0254.

When I change the To x value it does the same thing.

It is clearly something related to metric given that 25.4mm = 1".

My default units are metres. I was not sure what the From x value meant because when I put in what I assumed was the correct values (which you have confirmed), for example -0.2, it started at the origin point at the bottom. In other words it only gave me half a catenary.

If as you say it thought I was in inches then 0.2 inches would certainly look like it was starting at the origin.

Perhaps it is not recognising that my default units are metres.

Do you have any additional instructions please? I am trying to create a catenery with different start and end heights and a limited number of segments, for example about 10. It creates thousands of segments. I also cannot work out the logic for changing the start and end heights.

I have reduced the sides/unit width to 1 but it only reduces the segment count to about 100.

I cannot understand what the From x value means. My test catenery is 1m x 1m but I put in a From x of -12 and it starts at about -0.5?

Double Line cannot handle T junctions, only a simple path. As I pointed out that detailed plan is less than 1% of the total area to be modelled so I am not wanting anything that requires "cleanup". I was looking for a single-step solution. Streetgen gives that with virtually no cleanup required.

Looks a mess to me. Sharp corners and walls leaning over. Am I missing something?

Another problem rears its ugly head. One I have run into before.

After building the walls I select a wall texture and shift-click on one of the walls which should paint them all. It does, but on a lot of the faces the texture runs up at 45 degrees instead of parallel to the ground.

Sometimes I can correct them by sampling nearby walls and repainting those ones. Other times they refuse to correct themselves no matter how much I sample other textures and paint on those ones. I either have to reposition the texture manually, or paint the area and surrounding walls with default texture. They will then paint correctly with the wall texture. Definitely feels like a SU bug.