In this video tutorial I show how you can use Ruby coding in SketchUp to have some fun: Create 3D geometry, draw with code, bend the software to your will...
No need for previous coding experience. This can even serve as an introductory "learn to code" curriculum.
Tutorial Video
https://youtu.be/BlC7eerfS1U?list=PLxUo4IvucruefSR-dwEs7pHAjQZgoOhw0
This is a free sample instructional video from the book "Architectural Design with SketchUp: 3D Modeling, Extensions, BIM, Rendering, Making, and Scripting" (2nd Edition). I discuss this topic more in detail in that book's Chapter 7.
Want more of these videos? If you own the book, use the password from the inside cover to gain access to all of my remaining videos on Wiley's website: http://www.wiley.com/go/schreyer2e. If you don't yet have your own copy, follow the links in the sidebar to get one. It is a great reference for SketchUp!...
This post follows a theme that I explored in several other of my script examples as well: Copied objects in SketchUp don't appear overly realistic if they represent natural items; their geometry is simply too perfect. This is true for landscape items (trees, shrubs) but also for things like wooden boards (see left side in the image above): On a collection of real boards, the knots would be distributed somewhat randomly, not as shown here.
Textures before (left) and after (right)
Turns out, we can fix this easily with a few lines of code. Just select textured objects, run the code snippet below, and your textures are randomized enough to look realistic (as can be seen in the right side of the image above).
TIP:Want to use this without coding? This script is also in one of the tools of my Random Tools extension.
Drag the slider to see the result of this code
Let's Explore the Code, Step by Step
The following steps reference the...
At least when it comes to creating realistic-looking vegetation in SketchUp, it is important to be able to randomly place, scale, and rotate objects. Nothing looks worse than a "sterile" copied/pasted row of trees, for example. Of course, this applies to other objects as well, like e.g. a shag carpet or fur. Let's fix this with today's code snippet.
Random grass in a randomized landscape
Typically, the objects to be placed would come in the form of components (trees, grass, bushes, as in the image above). And those then need to be placed somewhat randomly on one or more faces in your model. A good example for that is a lawn, as I discussed in Chapter 5 in my book. As I mention in Chapter 4, there are of course several extensions available that let you accomplish this task. However, as it turns out, we can re-use two pieces of example code from Chapter 7 and do this with just a few...
https://youtu.be/mnAv54zK1DE?autoplay=1&loop=1
The resulting turntable animation
Every once in a while it's very useful to be able to precisely control the view in SketchUp. One of those cases is when you are creating a turntable animation video of an object (like the one shown above). The snippet below allows you to set that up by creating pages with defined view parameters.
First, we need to set the eye (view) height. That is best roughly located at the middle of the object, nine feet in my example. Then we are simply creating as many pages as necessary (in SketchUp proper, those are called "Animation Scenes", of course). I decided to go with four orthogonal views that all point at the object (which for this purpose needs to be located at the origin). A zoom_extents command then makes sure everything is consistently in the view, independent of how far the viewer is away from the object.
As you can see, there are a bunch of parameters that...
Dropping all stones to zero (Model: "Rock for landscape 02" by Intresto from 3DW)
The following simple code snippet takes any objects (groups or components) that you have selected and drops them to the ground (i.e. moves them to z = 0). I find this quite useful sometimes to just make sure that all those objects in my model are actually on the ground plane and not 1/64" above or below it. Just keep in mind that this routine uses the lowest point in an object's bounding box. Select the object to see how that (blue) bounding box looks like before you use the code.
Also: This does not work for lines and edges because for those you will need to move their vertices individually to z = 0. I'll post a tutorial for that at some later point.
Code Snippet
Select some objects in SketchUp (groups or components only) and run this script.
This collection of small script snippets presents handy little routines that...
