@slbaumgartner said:

I believe you can find these settings in the OptionsProvider named "UnitsOptions" in the model's OptionsManager. The names in that OP are pretty clear, but you may have to do some experimentation to figure out what the numeric values mean for the key "LengthUnit".

You would rarely need to use those values. Only if you needed to implement a custom unit function that SU doesn't already implement. I did write a library to expand area and volume units - as well as formatting of floats in the user locale: https://github.com/thomthom/SketchUp-Units-and-Locale-Helper

As Daniel mentioned, I wrote an article on this. It's actually less work to make it work for whatever unit the user is using because you use the methods that the Ruby API provides for this.

Basically, all units in SketchUp is internally inches. Work with that - and just ensure you use the Length.to_s method to present the unit to the user. If you want to define some specific length to your calculations, use the helper methods of the Numeric class, sch as: 1000.mm to define a Length object representing 1000mm. It will be stored as inches, but when you convert it to a string it will appear in the current model's units.

It works in SU2013. Did you install the RB file from this thread, or the RBZ from the PluginStore?

Thanks for the feedback. I think I have a fix - but I don't have an XP machine to test on.

I've uploaded a new version on BitBucket: https://bitbucket.org/thomthom/tt-library-2/downloads

Can you try that and let me know if it works. Then I can upload it to the Plugin Store and Extension Warehouse.

That operation should be transparent...

Hmm... must be some differences in the environment variable between Win8/7/Vista and XP.

Can you open the Ruby Console and give me the result of ENV.each { |k,v| puts "#{k} = #{v}" } ? Then I can make a patch for this.

@g64 said:

However to install the actual rb plugin,

Install it as an RBZ package from the Plugin Store: http://sketchucation.com/resources/pluginstore?pln=tt_solid_inspector

(I haven't had time to update all my threads to point to the Plugin Store yet.)

@utiler said:

Chris/Thom, we'll leave it up to you guys.

I'll coordinate Chris' work from Norway.

Hat tip

Where are we going to keep warm now?

Hm... I've not had time to look at this yet, but TIG's comment about the font list not being populated could be a clue. Maybe IE11 had removed the MS hack I used to get the font list...

The %20 instead of a space is just IE transforming the path string into a URL string. Nothing wrong there.

@mptak said:

In general Ruby (or Python as well) it seems that you use subclasses but this seems problematic.

Yes, though then it's normally in a server environment where you have more control over the environment where your code is run. In SketchUp the user controls the environment and the developer is the guest - flipping the roles.

@mptak said:

I presume that by adding methods to the Sketchup::ComponentInstance class I am breaking
all the rules

Any plugin that modified the core Ruby and SketchUp classes and modules will not be accepted to the Extension Warehouse. This is because of the risk of clashing with other plugins if they implemented the same modifications. Or even our method if we decided we wanted methods with the same name. (And it's hard to debug when there's like 100 plugins installed on a user's machine.)

Since the SketchUp Ruby API is a shared environment ensure you encapsulate all your code into your own namespace (module). That way you ensure you don't conflict with other extensions.

If you plan to submit to Extension Warehouse I'd recommend that you read up on the guidelines before you start your project so you can save yourself some refactoring. The guidelines are there to ensure no conflict and encourage good practices so they are good to read in any case.
http://extensions.sketchup.com/developer

General guidelines I wrote up a while back:
http://www.thomthom.net/thoughts/2012/01/golden-rules-of-sketchup-plugin-development/

What version of TT_Lib2 do you have installed?

We are setting up a C++ Hello World example for Visual Studio and Xcode. That will give you better environments to work and debug in.

Yes, currently the SLAPI cannot access the live model. That's why the old C++ can still be used in the current version of SketchUp.

Once SLAPI do support this the old C++SDK will be completely removed from the product.

@jiminy-billy-bob said:

model.active_layer
model.materials.current
model.pages.selected_page

Don't forget model.styles.selected_style

How are you getting the temp path? When I tested with unicode characters in the username and used ENV['TEMP'] it returned a DOS 8.3 ASCII format path which Ruby 1.8 was able to read.

Don't you just love the consistency of the API?

@renderiza said:

@3dsmax9 said:

loop selection is great, is it possible to do a ring selection ?

ThomThom's Quadface tools has a ring selection feature and more.
:

Have a look at how I defined a"quad" in QuadFace Tools. Both Fredo and TIG use that in some of their plugins which give a nice interobility.
https://bitbucket.org/thomthom/quadface-tools/wiki/Overview#!quadface-definition

Just a brief history of why I picket the set of properties I did for the diagonal edges:

1. Hidden property doesn't smooth the shading of the quad. Each triangle would be shaded flatly.
2. Soft+Smooth give nice shading, but if you want to make the whole mesh also appear soft+smooth then the quads will break.
3. Soft+Smooth + CastShadow=false gave the best result for me. Once could create a mesh with quads where the border edges of the quads could also be soft+smooth.

I didn't use an attribute because they are slow - performance was important here when traversing thousands of entities. And I liked that you could create the quad manually via the UI if you wanted to. The one thing that is still an issue is that if you use the Soften Edges tool in SU it might unsoft some diagonals.

@renderiza said:

@thomthom said:

Have you used GitHub and git before?

Github | Bitbucket
I now love Repositories like Github & Bitbucket they are really useful and make my life easier so thank you for mentioning them.

Excellent! If you aren't using it already I'd recommend SourceTree as a really nice and good GUI that can handle both Git and HG as well as managing your repositories hosted at GitHub and BitBucket.

I'm in the progress of writing a new set of core classes that will return quad faces from a set of SketchUp entities. I'll make this as generic and small as possible (and fast) so ti can be easily implemented in extensions that want to support quads. I'd love to see more quad-based tools.
QuadFace Tools grew to a decent size, but there is's just the basics. There is much more that would be great to have.