Hey everyone! I've been thinking about making a cool new background for my desktop and I thought of making something with transparent droplets on a surface rendered with Kerkythea. To do so, I first need to make the droplets and that could be time consuming if I want to make some in large numbers manually in Sketchup. However, I can surely find an easy way to make an image of droplets. Is there a plugin or a method out there to make a surface plot from an intensity map/image?

Thanks,
TheDro

@byrnebm: Did the plugin TIG suggested work for you? If not I might be able to write something up for you to brush up on my ruby skills. Let me know.

If you open up Window>>Ruby Console, before running the plugin, the debug information will tell you how many cubes were created, among other things. The other things are the amount of time each step takes to run. This is probably more helpful to me than to you but remember, this is still in beta .

I might eventually get to adding that feature but it's hard to say when. I've been pretty busy this summer and plan to be until September so I might not get to programming any time soon. I just checked out some of the methods of components (instance and definition) and there is a "bounds" method (not found in the api documentation...) which I could use to run my script. This means it should be possible to make it work for components but I might not get to it any time soon.

Have a great summer .

For those of you who would like to export your greatest Sketchup creations into MineCraft, now you can! MCExport is a plugin that is used in conjunction with my Voxelize plugin in order to transform a solid in Sketchup to a bunch of blocks saved in a .schematic file. The Voxelize plugin can be found here:http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=36063. The .schematic file can then be imported into your MC world using MCEdit. To use the MCExport plugin, you need to put the mcexport.rb file in your plugins folder. Unfortunately, the format of .schematic files requires Zlib which is a compression library. For this you need to actually have a ruby installation on your computer. If you don't have ruby already installed, I would suggest you install version 1.8.6 since this is the version that is used by Sketchup. This would reduce any potential conflicts between versions. Now for the MCExport plugin to see Zlib, there are a couple methods that can be used. For a Windows user with a typical ruby installation, you can place the tdloadpaths.rb file in your Sketchup plugins folder. This is the method I would suggest for users who are less familiar with moving files around or editing ruby code. If that doesn't work, you could modify the tdloadpaths.rb file to reflect the location of your own ruby installation. I think it is also possible to change the "require 'zlib'" line in mcexport.rb to the full path where the file zlib.so is found on your computer (for example: "require 'C:/Ruby186/lib/ruby/1.8/i386-mingw32/zlib'"). Using this method, the tdloadpaths.rb script wouldn't be necessary. Yet another possibility would be to copy the file zlib.so to the Sketchup plugins folder, although I've been advised not to advise people to do this .

Now, to use the plugin, first select the group containing the solid that you want to export to MineCraft (see how to use voxelize) and then select Plugins->MCExport (0.1.0). Next, choose where you want to save the file. The file should be named <filename>.schematic. Next, choose the parameters you would use in voxelize (I would recommend trying out voxelize alone before MCExport). If the export is successful, the .schematic file should appear where you chose to save it and it can be imported using MCEdit.

The plugin is still an early version and doesn't make sure that the solid is too big to be exported to a .schematic file, nor does it give the user the option to see the voxelized solid in Sketchup, nor does it let the user know if everything was successful... But it's work in progress and these features will be added eventually .

Well, have fun!

MCExport version 0.1.0

Script written to find Zlib.so

@Gillman: I'm glad to hear that it was of use to you.

@Khai: I've been looking at the structure of the .schematic file which is used to import structures into Minecraft using MCEdit. I think I've got it figured out but I still need to write the code and I'm reading the book of ruby to try and figure out the best way to do it.

@Everyone: I've added a new "spiral" algorithm to prevent interpreting sharp edges of solids as "entrances" to the solids. Basically, I improved the algorithm to work with more solids which is good. I'll upload the new version once I'm not too busy with work/school.

Well it's possible to spread out the cubes just by modifying any one of the cubes since they are all instances of the same component. So you can double click on one of the cubes, then use the scaling tool to shrink it, and they will all shrink while remaining in position, and this will produce spacing between them all. As for the plane slicing, I'm not sure I follow. Could explain in more detail, 22curious?

I'll probably release a new version tonight that calculates the position of the cubes MUCH faster.

@Khai Hah! Minecraft is actually what first inspired me to write this plugin since it would be a relatively simple way of creating complicated geometries (building plans). It may have other applications though such as Monte Carlo simulation using Geant4. Geant4 is basically a particle physics toolkit that's used to simulate particles interacting with matter. Making geometry with the toolkit can be quite tedious to do code-wise and is far more difficult than using Sketchup. Making cubes is simple though and the application of my plugin is obvious in this case. Anyways, back to Minecraft . As for exporting to a compatible format, I would first have to figure out what that format is but I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult since the plugin already creates a 3D "binary" matrix. I'll get to that ... eventually.

@Dan Thanks again. I'll get to reading your links concerning modules either tomorrow or the day after.

Thanks for the changes, Dan. It's my first time programming in ruby and I'm still a bit iffy about modules and classes and when to use which. I've looked at some documentation about them but haven't had time to read it thoroughly. I've preceded my method names by td_ based on something I read in a thread around here having to do with name conflicts between plugins. Do I need to do that or can I skip it since my plugin is now in its own module?

Well to "layerize", if by that you mean look at the model layer by layer, you can use the Section Plane tool. The plugin produces a 3D matrix of 1s and nils which could easily be manipulated, too. As for the lego blocks, that could be implemented by using this matrix in a clever way.