Posts made by thomthom

Wow! This is fantasticality surreal!

How did you manage to turn that profile photo into a 3D head sculpture?

@optimaforever said:

I've always wondered why thomthom proposed the triangulate quads option. now it makes more sense.
I thought you lose the quad properties when triangulating but apparently not.

QuadFace Tools quads can be planar SketchUp quads, or they can be two triangle separated by an edge that is Soft+Smooth+Not Casting Shadows.
It's not intuitive, but it was the only way I could manage to sanely work with quad meshes in SU.

@optimaforever said:

Note that my meshes aren't perfectly quadbased; there are sometimes tris. I'm wondering how it will manage that ;D

Quads are not a hard rule. Some times a tri or even n-gon in the right place makes the mesh simpler and easier to work with.

@rich o brien said:

...which I think holds the record for the 2nd deepest plugin menu entry in the world...

I think Vertex Tools might battle this...

Ideally I'd want this to be part of the native export dialog box. If only I could get the attention of someone who works in SketchUp...

@rich o brien said:

I could go down the rabbit hole of animation...or keep my sanity. I'll choose latter.

hands Rich a mad-hatter-hat

You know your path!

Dude! Rich, that scene will haunt my nightmares - love it!

Hi

Bitdefender started reporting false positives for SUbD last week. I've submitted a False Positive report to them, hoping they'll update their definitions soon.

In regard to your recent post: can you check if C:/Users/Username/AppData/Roaming/SketchUp/SketchUp 2021/SketchUp/Plugins/TT_SUbD/libraries/2.1.7.0/2.7/win64/SUbD.so exists on your machine?

If it does, and you still get this error, can you ZIP up the C:/Users/Username/AppData/Roaming/SketchUp/SketchUp 2021/SketchUp/Plugins/TT_SUbD folder and send it to me please?

(False positives from AV software is such a pain to clean up.)

Thank you for the peak into your workflow.

@einstein said:

I've got one more feature suggestion.
Merge close vertices "through groups", so if many groups/ components are selected, instead of raw geometry, vertice merge can also be performed. Currently it seems that we can only work on raw geometry. Merging vertices is sometimes a crucial fixing/ optimization algorithm and it's good if it can process many objects at once.

I recently worked with a model - bunch of people, hundreds of thousands of faces altogether and it got imported so bad that every single face was separate, can you imagine that... I mean, I know you can. I worked around by exploding all the groups, merging the vertices and regrouping with "Loose to groups" plugin, but I would rather not repeat that in SketchUp anymore...

hmm... main challenge here is that VT doesn't have any way to select anything other than vertices... Will have to think about this one.

Very nice! Thank you for posting back your experience and progress.

I love to see what people create, and hearing the experience helps me with future development.

@einstein said:

My suggestion was to enable not only bevelling vertices but also rounding them. So let's say bevelling means that you add one edge at a vertex between two existing edges and rounding means that you add more edges and create an arc between them. Like in Blender - you bevel a vertex and use mouse scroll to add more segments. This is the feature I pursue. There are several corner-rounding tools for SketchUp but none of them allows manipulating vertices directly, like your plugin does. That's why I believe my suggestion makes sense

Gotcha. Yea, I have it on my list of ideas already. Rounding, or profiled, bevels are however much more complicated. I need to do more research for that.

Are you looking for something other than what Shape Bender offers?

Hi

If you bought Vertex Tools version 1 it will not be able to activate version 2. A major version upgrade require a new license.

After 10 years version 1 is retired and only version 2 will be receiving updates.

There is still a 50% discount offer to upgrade from version 1 to version 2. To obtain your discount codes, enter the email you used to order VT1 into the form on this page: https://evilsoftwareempire.com/discounts

-T

Loving these various solutions to creating a water tap!

@builder54 said:

On a side note, I know that Quad Face Tools was recently updated. I was attempting to use the offset loop option but kept getting the same error message that VT2 is giving me.

Can you post back what that error message was?

Yea, I see there would be use in being able to report what SketchUp would consider is a solid vs 3d printable solid.

I got a similar issue logged already: https://github.com/thomthom/solid-inspector/issues/40

Mind you, Solid Inspector 1 matches closer to what SU consider a solid, and should still work with newer SU versions and can be installed side by side with SI2.

@builder54 said:

I do encounter Bug Splats frequently. I sent off a few of them, and recently with my name and email address. It appears to me that they happen most often when I hold down the CTRL key to create new vertices. The next time it happens I'll record the movement that's causing the bug splat before I get out of it.

I'm not finding any error reports for VT2 coming from SketchUp 17 users the last month that has any name or email attached.

Did you in this case really mean the SketchUp BugSplat dialog? Not the Vertex Tools error dialog?

@builder54 said:

Bug Splat

Oh - you mean that dialog? That is not a BugSplat. BugSplat is a dialog from SketchUp when it crashes. It says BugSplat in the dialog.

That error dialog is from Vertex Tools itself - catching bugs in Vertex Tools. I know they might feel much the same, but the distinction is important. You only see BugSplats when SketchUp crashes (exits).

Can you reliably reproduce the error? If so, can you send me the model and step by step instructions?

@builder54 said:

Apart from the occasional bug splat

BugSplats while using Vertex Tools?
(Did you submit any of the BugSplats? And if you did, did you enter a name/email description?)

@builder54 said:

I've posted here a gif of how VT2 freezes, and selection shuts down. In the gif you'll see my mouse is unable to select/highlight anything. Once I get out of the tools environment, I can highlight an area in blue then reactivate the tool. But still nothing changes until I move the gizmo. That for some reason allows me to begin selecting other vertices again. Any thoughts on what I can do to fix this? Or is it a known bug?

What version of SketchUp are you using? And can you check what version of Vertex Tools 2 you have installed? (You find this in the extension manager.)

@xinige said:

Hello, I bought SUBD and have tried it for 2 days, countless times. Still can't activate. I'm in China and I've used VPN

Hi, if you are still having issues, please use the Support contact form: https://evilsoftwareempire.com/subd/help

@einstein said:

Hi,
I was thinking of how to achieve controlled one-axis scale with vertex tools 2.
As far as I know, we currently have two methods of scaling, each having its limitations:

• the "gizmo scale" where we can scale vertices in one axis (non-uniform scale) but cannot choose to scale origin - it is arbitrary set to center of selection,
• the scale tool available from toolbar icon, where we can scale with more precision: pick scaling origin, then source and target position. Very handy, but only lets us do uniform scale.
  It would be very cool to combine advantages of both methods and have a precise, non-uniform scaling tool with soft selection.

With the gizmo you can move the gizmo to a custom location before you scale.

Adding a feature request for non-uniform scale with the Scale Tool.

@einstein said:

PS 2 From time to time I get a message that my VT2 licence is invalid, then I have to type my key again. It is not a big issue as it happened a few times this year (firstly with VT, now with VT 2), but I thought I would mention it.

That's strange indeed. I've not heard of that. Almost sounds like something is resetting files on your machine. Do you have software that cleans up your machine?

@megiveup said:

I'm not sure where to ask this but here goes. I've installed Vertex Tools and have a beginners question. I can't seem to get the soft selection to work. I make a selection and type in a distance and nothing changes and the soft-selected count says zero. I've tried typing in small increments and large increments but nothing changes. What am I missing?

Does it happen with any model?

Can you share an example model?