A wave of scaled boxes
Scripting geometry (as described in Chapter 7) can make things look very interesting (and quite beautiful) with a rather small amount of actual code. You can see this in the patterned panel example or in the pulled brick post. Both of those examples use a combination of sine and cosine functions to create a "wavy" pattern that nicely undulates shapes and geometry. There are other functions, however, some of which you likely remember from algebra and trigonometry classes. But even without delving too deeply into this, I thought it would be useful to have a reference for some interesting functions that may be of use.
TIP:Want to use this without coding? This script is also in one of the tools of my Scale By Tools extension.
The interactive examples shown below use the following grid of 1 inch cubes in SketchUp that were simply scaled vertically according to the lines of code that are included at the bottom...
I came across brick wall designs today where the architects were considering various options with pulled bricks. This design approach has been used before in many different ways but the basic principle is always the same: In a brick wall that is dominated by stretchers, you insert strategically placed headers which then protrude a little bit beyond the brick wall surface. This creates a very nice pattern with interesting shadows. The first image below shows such a design in a SketchUp model:
A wall with evenly pulled bricks
Given that in reality these are placed manually it may be reasonably easy (and therefore not too costly) to vary the extend of their extension beyond the surface and thereby create more interesting undulating patterns. One such pattern is shown below:
And one with a sinusoidal pattern
As it turns out, this is very easy to do by simply modifying some of the scripts from Chapter 7 and combining coding with a carefully created SketchUp model....
If you came to one of my presentations at the 2018 SketchUp 3D Basecamp in Palm Springs and are interested in the slides, here they are. You can find all of the code examples from the talks here (and on your USB "Stick of Knowledge").
In this presentation, I not only gave an introduction into Ruby coding with SketchUp, but I also explained how my own SketchUp extensions came to be and what is behind those from a coding perspective.
Feel free to write any questions you have into the comments below. All the best with your Ruby coding endeavors...
Presentation Slides
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I just updated my Ruby Code Editor extension to version 4.0 with many fixes and new features. You can read more about it in my announcement post:
https://alexschreyer.net/sketchup/sketchup-ruby-code-editor-4-0-now-available/
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I received an email a few days ago by someone who needed to calculate volumes and face areas in SketchUp for the purpose of estimating. I suggested doing this in a few lines with Ruby and as it turns out, it is pretty easy as long as the objects that need to be summed up are "solid" groups in SketchUp. I thought the solution could be useful for others, too, so here it is:
Here's the total
Just paste the code below into the Ruby Code Editor in SketchUp. Then select the groups that you would like to sum up and press the Run button. With this version, you will get the sum of the volumes as well as the areas of the perimeter surfaces (e.g. for estimating formwork). You can use this piece of code and customize it to your liking. For example, you could export the data separately for each object to a text file (or to a multiline messagebox) for use in...
