Hello TIG,

Thought this plugin would serve for 2D exports but it's actually not. I might be wrong but I don't believe there is a plugin that hides the rest of the model from the 2D export. For instance, sometimes, I'd like to just make a 2D export of a furniture inside a whole project in order to show how it looks on its own. Even though the "Hide rest of the model" function is enabled, it's ignored in the export file (png or jpeg). No matter how much of the model was visible in the viewport, the whole model will be seen in any cases. The only workaround for me right now is just to select all, unselect the only element that I want to make visible and delete rest of the model, do the export, and undo the objects removal. But it can get tricky when there are groups of groups and you need to manage inside them which you want to keep or not...
Do you think you could create a feature that would somehow allow this ?

Thank you

That's what I thought but I just wanted to be sure I wasn't missing anything ! Thanks !

Thanks for this help, that makes sense now. I knew there was something missing in the parents/children hierarchy but didn't know what. I may bother you with another question if you don't mind.

Can the plugin keep the starting point (considered to be 0 and with a defined value as maximum sliding lenght) of a slider joint applied to 3 sliding doors at the same level? Let's say I would launch the simulation and move them at different lenghts. In the end, I would stop the simulation and keep them at these various positions. But when launching the simulation again, it would consider the initial starting point as a limit for the three of them, no matter how far from it they are.

I don't know if i'm very clear, that's quite hard to explain but I can provide pictures if that does not make sense.

To simplify my question : Once simulation is stopped with objects moved, is it obliged that the reference point of the slider joint is changed according to each new position of the objects ?

I swear, that's my last one

Hello Anton !

Many thanks to you for both clothworks and MS Physics plugins, these are really nice to use and user friendly. MS physics can sometimes be a little tricky when it's about animating a model with a lot of groups but I guess there's always a way to make things work.

In a project I'm drawing for a client, I'm designing a sliding/folding door which is made of hinge between the panels. I found pretty easily how to achieve the folding action with rotation limits and for the moment it's possible to slide it but I had to reduce the slider joint stiffness in order to be able to fold panels completely (don't know why it's not possible when stiffness is set to one).
But my biggest concern is to be able to keep the sliding action on one panel (the others linked by hinges are following) without applying a straight constraint on the whole panel. I'd like only the hinge part of this panel to follow a straight way (a railing)

In the end, it should rotate freely and slide at the same time... If my problem isn't clear, I can always copy paste the concerned model in a new file if that's easier to understand.

(www.reynaers-particulier.fr)

Thanks for your help,

At least I tried ! And what about the gaps ? Can I avoid them to happen on the planks smallest sides ? Like continuous planks from floor to roof ? Or does it have to be necessarily linked to the longest sides gaps value ?

Hi Sam !

Thanks for the wonderful plugin first of all, that's really helpful ! I have two questions concerning the wood pattern, would it be possible to make continuous wood planks without any cuts ? I tried to increase the lenght value so it's higher than the maximum height of my volume to cover with planks but I'm still getting cuts.

I'm actually working on a house project extension. The original house has single lenghts planks going from floor to roof with three differents width of 7, 13 and 20 cm. Yet, your plugin seems to be the most appropriate to complete this task regarding the fact that I need the same spacing between the planks. But i'm looking for a way to lay planks of these precise widths, randomly against my volume. Your plugin is creating random width which provides me with a close result but not what I meant to do. I hope I'm being clear in my explanation...

I guess there must be a way to achieve that with maybe several plugins, but couldn't find the way. I also tried creating these 3 different planks as components and spray them along line with compospray, but this one doesn't allow me to control the spacing and doesn't adjust the planks top to my shape as your plugin does... Each plugin shows limits for this task and I'm afraid my request is a bit too difficult to solve... But still I'm asking in case of I can avoid making planks one by one

Hope you can help Thanks !

Well I converted to quads using quad tools then I shaped the thing using vertex tools while it was smoothed edges and when switching to sharp edges, it removes the stuff I did with Vertex tools. As I remember, I didn't do any changes in the mesh but I'll work more with SubD, maybe I'm just not doing things in the proper order. And maybe my computer is actually not so good, don't know...

Thanks for helping at least.

@optimaforever said:

Look at the subdivided mesh and you'll realize it's not quad at all.
It's a triangle based mesh.
So of course it will not work. You have the same problem as I had earlier.
Convert to quad before launching Subd.

Well, the difference between quads and triangles is quite unclear to me. Basically, a quad divided in two becomes two triangles, no ?

Anyway, I just drawn a square in wireframe, converted to quad and subdivided directly from subD, the plugin still getting stuck when switching from sharp to smooth corners. Not getting where the problem comes from... I'll end up thinking that's my computer

EnregistrementAuto_Sans titre.skp

Well I noticed this option smooth or sharp boundary corners but whenever I subdivide a group, even a very simple one (just a rectangle surface subdivided with artisan before), the result I get when pressing the first subdivision iteration is a mesh with round corners even though SubD is set at sharp option. So I try to switch it to smooth instead and then it goes in an endless loading and stucks in the the process until I get a windows saying that a script slows down my web navigator ??? What's the link to the navigator ??

Here is a screen of the geometry I made (basic one), as you can see the option is set to "sharp" but corners are subdivided and it gets stuck like if I change any of the options from the info windows.

There you go ! Just downloaded Fixit 101, it removed a lot of geometry and it's running smoother. Also, I had this geometry in a file with a lot of polygons so I isolated it in a new file and it's processing faster. Dumbly, I thought It would be the same processing speed but I guess SubD is actually processing the whole sketchUp file to display the crease tool stickers so it's asking a lot of ressources. Anyway, Maybe the file will help to understand my request : being able to crease the whole different meshes inside the group at once.
The problem is the geomtry is so badly done that some of them got subdivided with sharp corners and other got smoothed at corners resulting in a fail when trying to crease them sharp all at once. So the thing would be to crease manually each one desired.
That's why I'm asking if there would be a way to disable from the beginning the edges smoothing.

Thanks for helping !

curvy wall.skp

Yeah I did but looks like this shape is too complex and SubD can't handle it. I guess that's way too much polygons at once and the mesh is not properly made so it would crash everytime I try to crease, the whole mesh selected or simply a part of it. Never mind, I guess I should find another way to model this thing.

But still, I do believe that being able to decide directly from the beginning to keep bounding edges sharp or not would be a good feature to have. That would avoid having to edit the mesh after toggling on Subdivision. Even on simple geometries, the crease tool is very slow to show up and process on my side. I think my computer is good enough to run it (I have an overclocked i7 3770K)

I don't know if that would be hard to implement because it requires that the plugin is able to recognize the different bounding edges of each separate mesh composing the group. But maybe, that's not much of a big deal given the complex plugins you've made until now

Hi Thomthom !

First of all, many thanks for all your wonderful plugins, they save me such a precious time in my daily work on SketchUp. I've just bought vertex tools and SubD plugins few week ago and I'm slowly starting to get used to them.
One thing I'm working on is a curved wall with glass panels applied on it. This was achieved using Curviloft and Flowify and it's just an experimentation, not a work that has to be finished. I was wondering if there was a way (with SubD or another maybe) to subdivide only the iner faces of the glass panels.

The faces outside that link the glass panels to one another would stay straight whereas the inside faces would be smoothed to have a kind of Gaudi result in the end. Not sure if I'm being clear but that's one thing I couldn't achieve until now with Subd. When I smooth an object, I'd like to be able to decide when it's smoothing a geometry including its bounding edges or not.

I'm thinking here of an example with a water basin. I wanted to subdivide the stopper hole (where the water goes away)so that it's doing a smooth surved transition between the horizontal surface of the water basin but obviously Subd will also subdivide the edges of the horizontal surfaces, which I don't want. Of course, there's always a way to solve things so I just recreated the bounding edges to a rectangle and removed the undesired subdivided edges. Just wondered if you could implant a feature like that...

Thanks for your support.

1000 thanks ! So many functions that are missing in Vray are added with that plugin ! And also congrats for adding the camera clipping plane, that's going to make realistic sections renders way easier !!!

Hello !

I can see this post is very old but I just got this problem yesterday after making test renders with a concrete material. I changed the texture thinking it could be related to this but no. I checked for backfaces but everything was fine and showing the white side, I checked the hidden geometry and set the soften edges to 0 all over the geometry but no buggy lines appeared, I tried synchronization of materials with vray, I purged the file, cleaned the geometry using TT cleaner, tried to import the model in a new sketch up file and also tried to draw again the bugging geometry out of the previous one. NOTHING WORKED ! Now i'm out of ideas and I really can't understand what's causing the problem and why ? Because I never faced this thing before and it's not the first time I'm drawing complexe geometry on skp. The only way for me to get through this is to apply a custom texture with the paint bucket tool of sketch up and then, set it in Vray adding again reflections, bump etc. If I replace a sketch up texture like concrete tile by a preset vismat, it ends up with this stretched horrible texture and moreoever, the texture is not showing. Any idea would be welcome, I don't know what's going on... Thanks

Here is a screen of a what I get. I exploded all groups and textures are applied on flat surfaces, no hidden geometry, it's cut from everywhere. Looks like my Vray is corrupted, I removed and reinstalled it but still the problem is here... I don't know how will I render my next project...

Well I've checked the components axis but it seems normal. That wouldn't explain why they are dispatched all over the scene anyway... It seems like it's gonna stay a mistery !

I'm having the same issue as urban journey, this is pretty much what it looks like, but with grass

Any suggestion concerning my problem ?

Hi !
This is such a great plugin but I'm just having troubles to make a grass area by spraying a proxy grass made previously. I've tried different size of proxy, even a little sized bunch of grass but I still don't understand why sketch up is spreading my proxy everywhere in the scene (even on different heights). No matter what area I selected on my mesh (google earth terrain) it doesn't stick grass proxy to it but does a big crow all over my scene. Is that anything related to the fact i'm trying to apply it on a mesh, I saw a russian using "make fur" with proxy on a handmade mesh and he could apply it without troubles. I'm stuck with that, could you help me ? thanks

Thank you so much Didier for making all these wonderful plugins for free. All of them are saving from hours of extra work, very useful for architectural work ! Sketch Up users have almost nothing to envy to 3DS Max users, with a good practice skp can do almost anything thanks to developpers like you, TomTom, Tig, Fredo etc

Good work guys