oh you guys are going to love this one

export 2d stopped working....it would post menus...but no image written
(VRAY just never worked for me at all in any way on any day)
Tried to reload sketchup couple of times....no avail..still got menus but no actual image write
Went into the plugin and changed 1 text string by 1 character
(added a space in save file panel title)
Reloaded sketchup...works again
I suspect its the whole plugin mgmt infrastructure....not so much the actual plugin

Just got to love all this "free" stuff

jwhils...welcome to the party

My experience with this plugin in is that you have enter values / make selections several times to get them to take....things like selecting segments, enter values, etc.....does not appear to work reliably on my system.

I will leave it at that.

supposedly the VRAY plugin is suppose to be better. However, my experience is that VRAY doesnt do a single thing....just sits there. So I use this plugin extensively (even modified it to get defaults the way I want them).

Like I said earlier....this pluging works well....would recommend it....VRAY not on my recommended list (there are other plugins from various authors that I would not recommend at all).

RE OLE....I know about OLE but its hap hazard in AOO/LO....problematic

RE embed picture....Yes...do that now all the time...very manual...doesnt lend well to update
and managing versions.

Since AOO/LO draw is not much more than impress (abstract shapes, simple diagrams, 2D) just curious if anybody was looking to take the productivity package to the next level.

AOO/LO filters for Visio are real weak...so that is not an option. Could look at
inkscape,etc...but those seem to be more about making logos and icons. Could look at
vpython since there is a python bridge but vpython is really used for scientific
visualization (relatevely crude colors and shapes, no real library of shapes to build off of, etc).

so just curious.

Has anybody explored any sort of bridge between Open Office or Libre Office? The idea would be to be able to have a drawing or document in OO/LO where you click on it and it launches sketchup to edit the actual drawing....then when complete, takes the resulting drawing and places it where the original was.

Much like Visio and Word / PPT where from drawing in word / PPT you can launch visio, make changes and return to word / PPT and the drawing is updated.

I want to take a quick minute to point out that this plugin works VERY WELL.
I have not had one problem with this and have used it quite extensively.
This is a plugin I would recommend

RE BM plugin: If somebody is going to the trouble of making a plugin, then should make
sure it works (instructions accurate, if one went to the trouble of a
plugin then why not add it to favorites, why not put it in the directory
or tell user to put it into directory, etc). Of course, its always nice
to compare this BM plugin to Dulux plugin (that works but assumes I have
the hubble telescope in my hand to blow up the color wheel to see what I
want...but at least it works as advertised).

RE troll: Fine / fair....but understand Profile builder free is 10000% better done
then most plugins. Fredo stuff is 1000% better. The rest are marginal
at best (sort of does some things good...one plugin -to remain nameless -
does a few things intermittently ok. other things just dont work) and not
of much value at all at worst (another nameless plugin just does nothing
at all....says it installed successfully but does nothing when invoked).

            I guess my frustration is that alot of these plugins dont appear to be 
            robust in nature even for freeware.   People who write free Visio scripts
            (June the second has basically done alot of sketchup like behaviors for 
            visio very well) or inkscape python scripts dont seem to have these kinds 
            of problems, hence my shock and disappointment to the pollution of a great
            initiative.

            Before you all ask....I have to move off Visio...company is weening all of
            us off MS tools.  Dia is a joke, gliffy is a hosted app, smartdraw et al 
            are windows based, Libre office / open office draw are bad, but given this
            experience, bad is a matter of perspective. 

            That left inkscape and Sketchup...guys in another 
            group are using sketchup (given their output, I tend to think little or no
            plugins involved...more taking canned components and just placing them
            on a rectangle "card" kind of thing...then std export).   
            Given this experience, I really cant ever see me recommending buying pro 
            or layout.

            So yes....maybe I am a crusty old dinosaur, but when something earns my
            respect, I am just as effusive with praise as I am with criticism.
            LO/OO writer is darn good (much more stable than word, much better 
            control of document elements, support programmatic operations in table
            cells quite nicely - beauty of a table with functionality of a spreadsheet,
            able to handle large docs - 500 pages - well, etc).  I would recommend
            that tool to anybody.

This is an absolutely worthless plugin.

• instructions dont match Sketchup
• Overrides (and looses) default color palette

Just another worthless plugin

This is a fantastic plug in....free and paid are great (stable, provide what is advertized, etc). Everyone who strives to create a plugin should strive for this level of completeness and robustness

Appreciate the help, but do to:

• Most of these plugins just dont deliver function advertised
  (tesselation of a rectangle = thick line....give me a break)
  (Sometimes they work....sometimes they just plain crash sketchup)
• Install process is a mess
  (since names are unique, it might be good to delete old copies or even ask user
  if old copies should be deleted at install....theres a thought)
  (might be nice that if there are dependent plugins to check or hey even stall them)
• etc.

I will brute force things as much as heavenly possible and assume all plugins are unstable.

I will say Fredos, CF, and some others are stable and do deliver as advertised (even though
its not the actual function I wanted to accomplish....i.e. I recognize the difference between a plugin that does something else than what I wanted vs a plugin that is a mess).

Also, its fair to say I am not a power user...but am pretty decent at this so far...see attachment

That said...good luck to all

ok...so some genius suggested that this VRAY plugin was better than export 2d. So I loaded it (and as with the mess this whole plugin family indicates....newer versions of supporting plugins create errors). Got that fixed....got Vray installed. Now says cant load and asks if installed correctly. Since I get the menus and such...appears to be installed in some state.

Forget this

Going to use export 2d from now on!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

man is this a mess. Not only does the install not work well....but actually takes out other extensions.

Keep in mind that only a small fraction of plugins here or elsewhere actually deliver the advertised function let alone actually solve a problem. Unless somebody either starts to enforce plugins (delivers as advertised) or Trimble states clearly "ah ah ah....I know what you are thinking...does this plugin actually do anything or not....well being sketchup and the plugin community is basically the wild west...you got to ask yourself one question....do I feel lucky"

Seriously, I am not going to call out specifics....but there are authors here that have 10 or more plugins that range from the "gee that was false advertizing" to the "it works some of the time" to the "this just does work at all" My favorite is the plugin (wont say exactly what it is attempting to do) that does 2 things. First, it apparently swaps or inverts ALL the geometries in the Z direction. Second, totally disables selection of any kind (and corrupts the file...only way back is to use an older version of the drawing and redo the work hoping it doesnt mess things up again). And this plugin is highly regarded on this site....nice!!!!

I use export2d plugin for this kind of thing....one of the plugins that actually works quite well and makes backgrounds transparent in png. Good graphics outputs to date....so real pleased with it

Only if the deliver the function/feature advertised
Based on my experience with plugins on this site....profession baseball pitches have better batting averages

point taken about fixed vs floating.

The real point I was trying to make is that, on the face of things, the pwr factor should not be scaled by 3 or 3.0 since that throws everything off. I.e. since power not documented, a user may try 1.0 thinking he gets a 1:1 movement (or at least see that the movement is some linear relationship between the control points...for example, I could see that if the right control point moved and left does not, some sort of half way or avg be done). However, if there is some correction value inside the plugin, its pretty hard for the end user to figure out the value of power that corrects for that so he gets some sort of predictable behavior (the way this is now....set power to some number and get some movoement...do it again and a non intuitive less movement....do it a third time and virtually no movement)

So I got to ask

Since your "extrude line by 2 clicks" does a much much better job
(no tessellation approach)
Why didnt you use that as the core of the "line thickness" plugin????

BTW, I tried changing your pipealongpath to do what I need but everything I tried causes the plugin to just stop.
I can do the following from within your plugin context and plugin completes

• add an unrelated face
• Rotate said face
• etc

But once I try to change "circleO" to "ngon" or even just rotate "circleO" 45 degrees
(in order to make a 4 sided pipe look like a square), the plugin just stops

Krill....I did download thru the store but since one can not interrogate a script in RBZ format....I downloaded the old one to understand (buried deep in the code is a "pwr*3" statement which, on its face, would throw the whole thing off...ie. pwr= 1/3 might get somebody a 1:1 ration).

As far as my cantankerous tone, it really comes down to this "if somebody is going to dance, then they need to pay the band" Meaning if somebody writes a plugin (free or not) that does not provide the advertised function, then they should accept the criticism and scrutiny"

If a car mechanic offers to fix your car for free but instead really messes it up, are you happy since it was free???? No....free or note, you agreed to have the mech fix it. If I wanted to become an auto mech so I could fix it myself (since the other mech messed it up), I would. Sort of the whole fallacy of open source: Caters to the group the loves to spend hours tinkering with their car vs using the car to get somehwere to get something else done. I dont know about you guys, but even if I wanted to spend hours working on my car, who has that kind of time.

One more thing. Since so many of these plugins are garbage and dont know that until have installed, the store (or a plugin) should have a feature that tracks how often a plugin is used. That way a user can clean up the garbage once a quarter or once a year