Looks very intriguing.
If it could become as ubiquitous as .pdf's, it looks like an ideal format for presenting product proposals, user guides and tutorials.

Download updated in the top post
Nothing new - just a revision to incorporate TIG's suggestions for making the plugin more robust.

The spinning wheel is my favourite. I would definitely have taken that to be a vintage photo if I hadn't seen it here. The design of the machine itself is rather lovely too - the more 'modernistic' renders are very good too, but I have always loved how vintage toolmakers couldn't resist those lovely turned embellishments, and it looks like a similar love of craft went into that SU model.

@dave r said:

Other than the keyboard shortcut, how would this be different from picking the styles from the In Model Styles library?

That's pretty much it - just the keyboard shortcuts!
Probably just a reflection of my own way of working - but I don't like mixing scene tabs that all have different sub-sets of parameters, I like to think of them more as "viewpoints". So this just saves me having to have the styles window open - I do mostly engineering type stuff, so switching between solid, wireframe with axis colours, x-ray etc. are the only thing I use styles for.

@tig said:

All in all, a good'un as far as your go at scripting is concerned...

Thanks TIG, coming from you, that means a lot!
And thanks of course for the tips - the file system and script loading is the bit that I was most concerned about, I couldn't quite decide what should be in the module, and what as 'bare code'. Now I know it can all go safely inside the module, I can code with a little more confidence.

EDIT) I have now made a new plugin Render Favourites, that extends the features of this one by including many other rendering options, so you may want to check that out before loading this one. However, I keep this here, as a pure 'Style switcher' may suit your way of working better.

Hi All,

So finally I got around to learning some Ruby - helped no end of course by all the forum guru's great lessons here - and here is my first ever plugin. Trog's Style Chooser.

The plugin allows you to choose your four favourite styles, memorise them, and call them up from a dedicated sub-menu of the 'view' menu.
The idea is to be able to assign a shortcut key to the 'Recall' menu items, and then you can instantly change styles with a quick stab of a key. Of course, with the right settings, you can do something similar with scenes - but I prefer to use those just for storing viewpoints, and you can only assign shortcuts to cycle around them, which I find very annoying when I just want to quickly get to one of the first few from a long list.

A few instructions...
To assign a view, set up the model appearance as you like, and then, if it isn't already, store this as a named style. Then selected "View -> Style Favourites -> Store (X)".
To recall, "View -> Style Favourites -> Recall (X)".
The favourites are stored in a small file inside a sub-folder of the "plugins" folder, so that they are there for next time.
All of those options will be available for assigning shortcut keys.

Note that the Styles are referenced by name, so you need to be aware...

• To recall a style it must be resident in the current model (I added my favourites to my default template to make sure they're always there)
• The styles must have unique names.
• Recall menu items will be greyed out if no favourite has been set, or if the style is not present in the current model.
• A folder called "Trog_Style_Chooser" will be created inside the plugins folder to store your favourites.

MOST IMPORTANT. This is my first ever plugin!! Despite the wonderful examples provided here on the forum, I cannot guarantee that the plugin is perfect - there are no restrictions on how you may use it, but I also make no promises how good or useful it might be!!

DOWNLOAD..
Simply copy the .rb file to your Plugins folder

If any of the forum Ruby experts care to comment about the quality, or otherwise, of my code, I would be extremely grateful. I have tried to avoid all of the pitfalls that I have seen warnings about on the developer's forum - but I am very new to Ruby, and much of what I read goes straight over my head at the moment!

@solo said:

IMO the Star wars saga ended

Plenty of life left in it yet...

Skywalker vs. Skywalker
Two middle aged ex-rebels fall out over teaching the children the mystical power of "the force", dad is worried that the kids will turn out like grand-dad if they're allowed anywhere near a light-saber - a heart-breaking tear-jerker capturing the emotional trials of divorce proceedings and who gets custody of the service droids/Wookie!

C3P0 and R2D2's Excellent Adventure
An accident with the Millennium Falcon's warp drive leaves the two hapless droids stranded on 21st century earth where R2D2 finds fame as a dub-step bleepy drum-break producer and has to rescue 3PO from the clutches of Bill Gates' secret AI research laboratory.

Empire vs. Federation - 3D
A loophole in space time results in a Klingon fleet materialising in the same quadrant as the Death Star and forming an Axis of Evil with the Empire. Can the Federation fight their way through to link up with the Rebels in time to save the universe? LOTS of very loud explosions.

He he - well, it hasn't done 007 any harm. I think really that most of the nay-sayers first saw Star Wars when they were young kids. Whatever films they make, they can't hope to recreate the excitement felt at that age, especially when it was such a "first of its kind" type of film.
Good luck to them - there's a new audience being born every day, I'm sure there'll be folks that get a lot of enjoyment out of it.

Phew! Like Chris, I think I've probably avoided this one by developing fine de-selection and CTRL-S reflexes (years of practice having to use CorelDraw! he he)

Maybe a little off topic, but personally, I find SU's selecting habits rather bit-and-miss in general, in a way that would seem to encourage this kind of unwanted behaviour. Pretty much all drawing software that I've used defaults to leaving the most recently drawn item selected - i.e. using a tool that creates new geometry, by default, clears any selection made prior to using the tool. This often catches me out when I've just drawn some small detail, and then go to use a selection-dependent action or the entity info box, without noticing that unwanted items are still selected - but not the one that I just drew, and would expect to be selected.
I'm not trying to suggest that the problem discussed here isn't a bug - just that an overhaul of how SU handles selections is probably overdue anyway, lending the opportunity to get this issue addressed too.

Hi there,
Maybe THIS POST is what you are looking for?

@Clownwhisper.
Please try not to look a gift horse in the mouth. Almost all of the plugins here are provided by guys who take hours out of their free time to code amazing tools for us all to use FOR FREE. For the most part, they make every effort to make the plugins easy to download and install, given the limitations of the forum format (also provided for you FOR FREE).
The small effort required to find the attachment links, and follow the installation instructions that these guys usually make clear is surely not much of a price to pay in order to enhance your software FOR FREE.
(I have had many programs that cost big $$$$ in the past that were much more difficult to get working!)

Upgrade to SU8? Well that is your choice - but please bear in mind that this site is not provided by the official developers of Sketchup, nor do the plugin writers have any ties to the developers. So you should not choose whether to upgrade based on the forum plugins - most of them will function just as well in the free version - that choice should be based on the standard stuff provided by the official developers (they are the ones who want your money, not the kind folks here).

Great idea, Panga - this kind of thing can be so much fun, I love it when my brother's kids visit - I enjoy my "Uncle Steve" training sessions every bit as much as they do.
I would add to the other advice...

@panga said:

virtual Meccano

Yes, examples from the real world will make the principles of SU much simpler to understand. Creating a folder of basic components that are simple to fit together would be useful (e.g. the parts to build a simple car) - that gives a chance to raise interest by building interesting things very quickly; and good practice for navigating the model, inferencing etc. - the skills they will need to use the modelling tools effectively.
If the children are already familiar with Legos, Fischer-Technic etc., maybe model some of those as components to build with. I would not rely on using models from the warehouse etc. as they may be too complex - better to use components that they can easily learn to build for themselves when the 'geometry' tools are introduced.

@solo said:

Let them play

Yes!! To keep their interest, let them guide the learning as much as possible, and give them time to experiment. Encouraging sharing and teamwork may help to keep projects fun - try and have a shared components folder somewhere if possible, so that they can share their models with each other, or each work on a small component used to build a group project.

On a practical note - before you start any lessons, visit the schools and check out SU on their PC's, to make sure there are no technical problems (e.g. OpenGL graphics glitches), and that you are able to set up the required shared folders etc. without access permission problems. Solving technical issues is not easy when you are surrounded by a room full of children all wanting your attention!!

That's brilliant, thanks TIG.
Beautifully simple to use - yet another of your creations that makes me think "Why wasn't that in the standard toolbox all along?"

My usual method (used on screw/bolt holes all the time), is to use the 'entity info' window - you have to do each end one at a time, but I find it less fiddly that the scale tool, especially for holes, where the surrounding material can make it hard to see exactly what you're doing.
Just click on one of the end circles, and the 'entity info' should tell you that you have a circle selected, and its radius. Now just type the new radius into the dialogue. Repeat for the other end. The circle centres will stay where they are.
This way works great for drawing countersinks too (sorry no pics, I'm not at home). Once you have your clearance hole drawn, select one of the circles. Using the move tool with CTRL, drag a copy of the circle along the "tube" to the correct depth (locking axes with the arrow keys will help with this). Now select the circle on the top surface, and type an appropriate radius into the 'entity info' - hey presto, a perfectly conical countersink.

Note that this will no longer work if some other operation has broken the circle into 'loose' segments - so worth practicing some more with that scale tool too!

@roger said:

How many of us are looking at our mates and saying "really?"

...or just looking in the mirror in the morning in my case!

Your rant is entirely justified - the poor quality of documentation and tutorials is one of my biggest beefs with software developers in general; I can't even think of a "best practice" example from any of the major applications that I regularly use.
It seems it is the norm these days to leave such things to the tireless unpaid volunteers on forums such as this one. If the likes of Fredo, TIG, ThomThom etc. can do such a good job of explaining their tools, I really don't see what excuse Google/Trimble have for doing such a shoddy job.

The classic example of course, is coming across an item in a menu with a name you've never seen before. "Oooh, it's in the same menu as the tools I use loads, could be a useful time-saver." - clicks help file...
"Discombobulationator - use this tool for discombobulationating."
Thanks a bunch! (Corel in particular seem good at this trick).

My favourite Sketchup example is the downloadable .pdf manual. "Great" thinks me, I can still get help when I'm away from the internet working on a laptop. For sure, lots of great info there - but what the hell happened to the hyperlinking? There's not so much as a single bookmark in the entire document, not even for chapter headings! Pretty much all the software I use that can create .pdf's make it almost impossible NOT to include bookmarked chapters - if the document is structured with headings etc. so is the .pdf export by default. Did they turn off that feature on purpose just to get a bit of extra web traffic!?

Still, suppose we should think ourselves lucky that SU wasn't made by Microsoft! I often wonder if anyone EVER had an OS problem solved by clicking on the little Windows Help Centre balloon - it may as well just print up a generic "Have you tried turning it off and then back on again?" message!

...aaah, that's better. A good rant is so invigorating at the start of the day!

Hi Kallen,
The problem with your file seems to be that the "holes" template has some reversed faces, such that SU is having trouble working out 'inside' from 'outside'.

Fistly, a little tip - to make the orientation of faces easier to see, pop into the 'Styles' window, then choose the 'Edit' tab - now choose the most hideous colour you can imagine for the 'Back' colour. Now when you use the 'Monochrome' view (or your model has no materials), the problem show up much more clearly.

Because SU's 'solids' are not truly solid (as you can see if you delete a face), it has to make a distinction between 'front' faces and 'back' faces. Making sure that the 'front' faces are all on the outside is important in order to get some of the boolean operations to work reliably; and also for the application of materials and textures (especially if you ever want to render anything).
You can sort this out very quickly by selecting any 'back to front' faces, and choosing 'reverse faces' from the right-click context menu. By using the "hideous back colour" style, they'll easily show up when modelling so that you can get into the habit of sorting them out as you go along - they're not always easy to find in a large model with nested components etc.!

@utiler said:

percentages seem thwart with danger!

Yes, I quite agree.
Seems odd really, the SI system was conceived as a way to avoid confusion - a unified metric for the whole globe to make the exchange of ideas and goods more simple and reliable.
I blame those dastardly computer geeks - I was told once the tale, possibly urban-myth, that the EU changed from ratio to percentage for road gradients because it made life easier for the geeks who were digitising the survey data of the old hand drawn road maps. Sure as hell confused all the motorists when the UK's "steep hill" road signs were changed!

Part of the confusion possibly comes from yet another unit, the Gradian, or Gon, which you could think of as "metric degrees", where there are indeed 100gons in a right-angle. The silly name "gon" was invented precisely because of the obvious similarity of "gradian" with words like "gradient".
That unit is deprecated by most standards organisations these days, being retained in only a few specialised applications (some armies still use it for aiming ballistic weapons). I think that one stood as much chance of being accepted as "decimalising" time units!

@tig said:

I fully understand the 'fallaciousness' of these arguments I have set out, by the way

Never doubted it for a second!

@tig said:

But they show how the very large and very small produce unexpected results - divorced from 'reality' and what you might suppose will happen, when at first applying little thought...

Your Rubies do things that would have made Pythagorus' brain explode. "Unexpected" results, hmmm, now that I do find hard to believe!

But you're quite right, jumbling theory and reality in these kind of thought experiments really can be fascinating - and has a long history of provoking the insights that push science and mathematics forward.

PS) Anyone got a pet carrier and a geiger counter I could borrow?...

@tig said:

practical purposes

I would suggest that here is the nub of the problem.
Geometry is a only theoretical model for the shapes we find in the world around us. Just as Newtonian physics breaks down at velocities beyond our ability to comprehend, so using pure geometry on practical materials has an inherent "bandwidth" beyond which its axioms cannot be applied.
The steps never converge on the straight line because they do not have to exist at an arbitrary, humanly intuitive scale - nor be constructed of the physical units of the real universe (atoms, molecules etc.) Hence my fractal analogy - as purely abstract entities, the steps retain their geometric properties no matter how small we make them, because there is no absolute measure of "smallness" in pure unit-less geometry, only the relative scale of the parts of a form.
In reality, the carpet analogy breaks down at some point where the thickness of carpet, and minimum bend radius, grossly exceed the size of the steps. So it is a category error - we are applying an abstract mathematical theory in a situation where its axioms are not valid.
That is a valuable lesson that is all too rarely taught in school science etc. For example, the inverse square rule applied to the intensity of light, sound, gravity etc, is often used blindly - but the light intensity from a strip light within a room does not follow this, because the assumption of a point-source is broken.

@utiler said:

Percentages: Used in engineering circles; mostly to do with structures. 0% is horizontal and 90° is 100% so 50% is 1:1...

It may have been a concensus, but that doesn't make it right - 100% = vertical is is a very common misconception, as it does somehow seem intuitive.

Grade as a percentage is simply. 100 * (rise/run)

The only way that vertical = 100%, 45deg = 50% could be true is if it were a measure of angle (not gradient); i.e. 100/90*Angle(degrees). But we already have an accepted unit of angle called the degree, and 100/90 is an infinitely recurring decimal, making for a very troublesome conversion factor.

@tig said:

OK, the stepped version is 'crinkled up' by these zig-zags, but when these are so tiny the two overlay each other 'exactly' - at least for all intents and purpose

Ah, but surely that is not quite right. A true line has not just infinitesimal thickness, but exactly zero thickness (think of the boundary between the inside and outside of a solid; how "thick" is it.) So the steps cannot overlay the edge, because a true line has no "area" to overlay. The hypoteneuse length is a distance between two points, not a measure of the amount of graphite we lose from our pencil as we draw an imperfect representation of the vector.
We could even say that the stepped "approximation" is really a fractal, lying somewhere between a being line (one dimension) and filling an area (two dimensions).