Calculating Summed-up Volumes with Ruby (Snippet)

Calculating Summed-up Volumes with Ruby (Snippet)

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...
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Analyze This! Creating Geometry for Structural Analysis in SketchUp

Analyze This! Creating Geometry for Structural Analysis in SketchUp

SketchUp shell model for export to structural analysis software SketchUp is a great software for creating 3D or 2D geometry that can then be imported into analysis software (or used for analysis right in SketchUp). You already saw a few examples for this in my book: One is the building energy analysis setup with the OpenStudio plugin that I describe in chapter 4 in the book. Another one is the lighting analysis that you can do with some rendering software (LightUp is shown as one example in Chapter 5). What I want to go over here is how you can create a structural geometry model in SketchUp that you can then export to a structural analysis application. In my case, I am using VisualAnalysis because I use it for my teaching as well. This software is available for students as a free version and allows for importing DXF models. Of course, you can use the same method with other analysis software packages...
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