@matthew.robert said:

Does anyone know what exactly are the attributes whose values affect copies (manual copies, not COPY attribute copies)?

I do! I do!

Hey Matt,

The differences you're seeing at that certain attributes are stored on the instance, and others on the definition. For those on the instance, you can have unique values and formulas for each manual copy, whereas any definition stored attributes will be shared by all.

The atts stored on the instance are: x, y, z, rotx, roty, rotz.

Does that make sense?

Unfortunately, there's not an easy way to do what you're talking about. As you scale things like this your textures will start to line up poorly. One could imagine a ruby script that fixes this, but it wouldn't be particularly easy.

Better texture support is a common feature request for DCs, so it's good to see a concrete example of why it's needed. Wish I had a better answer for you.

Cheers,

You can see something like what you're asking about here:

http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=542278c6a8769763de650492e45fb14f&prevstart=0

This floor framing DC will add "shorter" cap studs as needed to fill the space that it is sized to.

If you're really just wanting to do tiles, then a texture would be preferable for performance reasons.

Cheers,

Remus is right. There's no "easy" way to tie DC redraws to scene changes. One could do it with a custom Ruby script.

It's on the feature request list, so it could show up in a future version.

Cheers,

Hey Dik,

Couple of options for you:

1. See if you can find a better parser. The CSV that we output uses the "double quote as escape character" csv approach, so the output will look like this:

"Value1","Value2","Value3","animate(""material"",""red"",""blue"")"

Note that the quote characters inside the 4th value are double quoted to indicate that they're not termination characters. Your parser needs to be able to recognize that the commas inside 4th values are not separators since they're inside single quotes.

2. Write or hire someone to write a custom Ruby exporter that does what you need. If you end up going down this road, feel free to PM me and loop me into the conversation. I could share some Ruby code that generates a simple report.

Cheers,

Scott Lininger
SketchUp Engineer

Hey ThomThom,

Unless there's some super-secret ninja trick that somebody can share, I'm not aware of any way to add menu items to "standard" menus via the Ruby API.

Cheers,

Wow, when it's in bold red how could we not respond.

The Film & Stage plugin has been on our target list for updating for some time, but as you say we have limited resources and it didn't make the cut for SU7.

@unknownuser said:

IT IS MY OPINION that SOMETHING should be done to give PRO-licensees a good, intuitive, thorough, and precision set of camera tools inwhich the camera could be controlled via user input values and/or cursor keys and/or shortcut keys and to store preset screen aspect ratios. Getting good transistion between scenes relying upon the mouse and steady hand and replicating output to match previous project output quickly and easily is not adequate for "professional" presentations.

So in the list above, what is missing from Film & Stage? I'm happy to dive back into that discussion.

Cheers,

That's a great idea, Bill. I've added it to the feature request list.

Cheers,

@peweuk said:

I don't even know (not being a coder) if it is even possible and if it is, how complex it would be to write it, but if there are any script writers interested in undertaking a project like this, again -I'd be pleased to hear.

This is quite doable. The Dynamic Components attributes are stored like any other SketchUp attributes, so both existing reporting tools and future ones are able to view (and modify) DC attributes.

If there are any coders out there who'd like to contribute some time toward building a custom DC reporting tool, I'd be happy to lend technical guidance. It's really just a matter of writing a recursive script that looks at each entity in the drawing or selection and dumping out the attributes of interest.

Cheers,

@thomthom said:

Just had another though, if you really want a modal window on mac? Not possible?

Not currently possible, unfortunately.

Here's what I do: I detect if the user is on a mac, and if so I open the dialogs with "show_modal". Modal dialogs on the PC are truly modal, meaning when they're visible you can't click on anything else in SketchUp, but on the mac they aren't truly modal... they just float on top of everything.

if is_mac == true
  dialog.show_modal
else
  dialog.show
end

It's a bit hacky, but it works.

@alan fraser said:

Scott, is this an improvement on the web exporter plugin in the SketchUp downloads section.

It's more of a variation than an improvement. Same idea, though.

@plot-paris said:

how are you doing it? is an image series created when the model is uploaded?

You got it. This processing takes some time, so you won't see your 3d view instantly after upload... but come back later and you'll be in business. The whole idea is to provide a lightweight 3d view without the need for special plugins.

Hey everyone,

I apologize if anyone has already pointed this out, but I wanted to highlight a new feature on the 3dwh and get your feedback. Some of you may find this really useful. You can read about it on the blog:

http://sketchupdate.blogspot.com/2008/12/new-spin-on-3d.html

Cheers,

Fantastic.

@chief1234 said:

I'm wondering if there's a way to load the engine onto any map without it being hardcoded.

Well, you could do one of two things.

1. Open one of the .skp files inside Plugins/knightgame and edit the maps directly.
2. Open the knightgame.rb file and modify the code to not load in a new model but simply run on top of the current model.

So yeah... it's doable. Let me know if you have specific questions.

It's important that DCs follow the standards, even goofy ones. A formula should work exactly the same way in spreadsheet X as it does inside SU, or you couldn't interoperate with spreadsheet X.

All that being said, my brain totally thinks of 0 as an even number.

Hey Remus,

I had the exact same reaction when I saw that pattern... but both Google Spreadsheets and Excel agree that odd(0)=1 and even(0)=0. So that's what DCs do, too.

Go figure.

@wo3dan said:

Is there a correct way for SU to handle flipped components with rotations in DC attributes, better than my (miserable) workaround?

Unfortunately, no. Rotations completely reset the current transformation before applying new ones, so it destroys your flip status. This bug has been recorded for a future fix. So the only workaround is to create a new component where the geometry (or a subcomponent) is flipped.

This is a known bug. BillW nailed the explanation. We're working on it.