Posts made by slbaumgartner

Box's answer is right if the four corners are to be at specified arbitrary heights that cannot be assured to be coplanar. On the other hand, shawb is right if you want a planar but skew-tilted roof. In that case you can arbitrarily choose heights for three corners but then the fourth has to match the plane defined by their triangle.

@mike amos said:

the subject is the additional geometry sketchup is known to produce.

Please describe under what circumstances SketchUp produces additional geometry. That hasn't happened to me, so I don't know what you are referring to.

Just for the record, there were indeed bugs in the offset tool in previous versions of SketchUp. They are much improved in SketchUp 2019.

Edge color by axis as a built-in tolerance that will accept edges slightly off axis. Sometimes, as here, edges that are close enough for it to color are off by minute amounts that can mess up other operations. One would have hoped SketchUp could be more consistent, but evidently that's harder than it sounds!

@modar said:

Hello,

I am in my first days with Sketchup. I had an experience in Revit API but here in Sketchup I found APIs in Ruby, C, Visual Basic, C++ and C#

I searched a lot to detect the difference between them but no luck.

Can you please help.

Regards.

The SketchUp Ruby API is embedded in the app itself for live action on the model. It is the main technique for implementing extensions (aka plugins).

The SketchUp C SDK is a separate library for creating standalone applications that can manipulate a SketchUp file outside of SketchUp itself and also for creating importers/exporters for other file formats.

The SketchUp C++ SDK is similar to the C SDK but is now being deprecated.

None of the other language bindings you list are officially supported by SketchUp.

The location of the hot-spot can vary from cursor to cursor, though it is most often at the lower left. In the specific case of the text tool, it is at the tip of the little arrow from the box labelled "A1" in the cursor. You need to place that arrow tip right over the dot in the middle of an endpoint inference marker to be sure that you will get a "leader text" anchored to that point (and automatically filled with its coordinates) rather than a "screen text" anchored to the display (initially saying "user text"). Yes, it can be fussy to hit that spot accurately, and all of us sometimes have to try again to get leader text instead of screen text.

The display screen is a raster made up of pixels. Likewise, the cursor is displayed as a raster icon made up of pixels. One of the pixels in the cursor (typically lower left) is designated as its "hot spot". You select by placing the cursor over a target in the model and then clicking the mouse.

But that selection action takes place on the user's display, where the continuous model contents are rendered as finite pixels each of which, depending on zoom, can represent a variable amount of model space. So, SketchUp needs a way to decide whether something in the model was meant to be under the hot-spot when you clicked. To allow for human ability to place the cursor exactly and also for the finite pixels of the display, SketchUp has a small window or aperture around the cursor's hot-spot in which it looks for something you might have meant to select. When it finds such content, the pick "snaps" to its location. There is no way to view or modify this aperture via the GUI.

In many tools, the green highlight on an inference point means that is where the pick point will snap when you click. On the text tool, this is not the case and since you can't see the aperture you have to be extra careful where you click.

It's a subtle aspect of the text label tool, arguably a bug. The inference engine detects an endpoint near the cursor and highlights it green with tooltip, telling you that point is being used for inference. But the text label tool doesn't actually anchor to that endpoint unless it is within the invisible "capture aperture" of the cursor! This can indeed be a frustrating and seemingly erratic behavior!

C2 A0 is the unicode for non-breaking space (html nbsp), so this looks like an issue with how this character is being handled by the various apps.

@pilou said:

I don't know why that works not with N*D or N+D or N-D

It works with N/D as a side effect of supporting fractional inches. Though it's a common request, the measurement box doesn't support arithmetic and doesn't really understand division other than integer ratios.

@danna said:

No ... rafters should not be closer, I would want them to stay at 24" spacing.

Scale affects everything proportionally, so if you scale the model by 0.75 the rafters will then have 18" spacing. To preserve spacing you will have to use a different tool (e.g. FredoScale Box Stretching) or redraw them.

@pbacot said:

I think that extension would be the Sketchucation Extension Manager.No?

No. It lets you selectively turn extensions on and off, but has no effect on the order in which they are loaded or the order in which their items are placed in menus.

Each extension's Ruby code tells SketchUp what items it wants to add to which menu. SketchUp adds items at the bottom of a menu in the order that the extensions are loaded during startup. So, at least in theory it would be possible to put all the extension files into a non-standard folder and have a single "master" extension in the standard folder that would load the others in whatever order you want (or not load them). I don't know if any such extension exists.

You didn't provide much of the information that would be needed to help you. For example:

• what Mac hardware (including any external monitors) and macOS version? SketchUp can become confused about where to place dialogs if you use monitors with different resolutions. Also, there is no guarantee the SketchUp 8 will run correctly on newer versions of macOS (though it might...).
• where did you obtain the copy of SketchUp 8? It has not been available directly from Trimble for some years, and who knows whether the one you obtained is intact...
• does any part of SketchUp 8 work correctly? Said the other way, are these dialogs the only issues you encounter?

An app requests more memory allocation from the OS when it needs it. Perhaps vray has a preference setting to set or change a limit what it uses? So far as I know, there is no macOS way either to limit or to increase the amount of memory used by an app.

@rogalxxx said:

turn HW acceleration off. happened to me in both 2018 and 2019

Did you perhaps mean "turn Fast Feedback off" in the OpenGL? Hardware acceleration is required as of SketchUp 2017 and can't be turned off!

I must add that since SketchUp sages are independent volunteers, we don't speak for Trimble. We speak our own minds and do not even always agree with Trimble or each other. Our opinions are our own and are just as valid (or not) as anyone else's.

When you installed SketchUp did you right-click the installer and choose "Run as Administrator"? If not, you could do so again and choose "Repair" from the installer options. Note that this Run as Administrator action is NOT the same as being logged in as an Administrator.

I can think of two possibilities:

1. The mouse is not configured to send the event SketchUp expects when you press the scroll wheel. There should be settings in the mouse control panel.
2. The scroll wheel switch has failed. Try another mouse and see if it works correctly.

@ntxdave said:

it appears that the dashed lines works in a way that all the sages tell us not to do.
Hope someone can show me that I am wrong!!

You are mostly right but partially wrong.

Indeed, the new dashed lines are implemented via layers. There are some issues with this method. If you set individual edges to use a dashed line layer, yes, you will violate the standard advice to use only Layer0 for individual edges, with all of the same potential issues as before the dashed line option. This visual effect has no impact on whether edges interact with other geometry. If you set a group to use a layer with dashes enabled, all the edges inside that group will receive the same dash pattern, which might not be what you wanted and so will force you to create additional nested groups based on dash pattern.

However, you don't need to violate the advice to always leave Layer0 active. You can change the layer of any geometry after it is drawn without making that layer active. Also, you can toggle an existing layer between solid and various dashed patterns after the fact and everything that uses it will follow suit.