Randomized Object Placement on Faces (Ruby Snippet)

Randomized Object Placement on Faces (Ruby Snippet)

by Alex SchreyerNo Comments
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...
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Set Up a Turntable Animation Video in SketchUp with Ruby (Snippet)

Set Up a Turntable Animation Video in SketchUp with Ruby (Snippet)

by Alex SchreyerNo Comments
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...
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Drop Selection to Ground with Ruby (Snippet)

Drop Selection to Ground with Ruby (Snippet)

by Alex SchreyerNo Comments
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...
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Export an Image from SketchUp with Ruby (Snippet)

Export an Image from SketchUp with Ruby (Snippet)

by Alex SchreyerNo Comments
The resulting image The following is a handy little Ruby tool if you frequently need to export the current view as an image in SketchUp. It basically allows you to pre-set all of the export parameters (including an export location) and keeps all of those consistent. Of course, this is not too hard with SketchUp itself (because it remembers the last used location and image parameters), but this script allows you to keep those parameters consistent even if SketchUp "forgets" them occasionally (i.e. after you work with a file in a different location). I use this script mainly when I need to create consistent images from many files, on which I work over an extended period of time. For that purpose, I have it set up as a menu item. In the example below, the image is exported as a JPG (just change jpg to png if you prefer that file format) at a size of 3000 px (with a 16:9 aspect ratio)....
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Merry Christmas, Joyful Holidays, and a Happy New Year 2019!

Merry Christmas, Joyful Holidays, and a Happy New Year 2019!

by Alex SchreyerNo Comments
https://sketchfab.com/models/ffc984f2997a42c884d0a7425dca0955 Dear friends and colleagues, I wish you and your loved ones a Merry Christmas, a peaceful and joyous holiday season and a happy and successful new year 2019! Cheers, Alex P.S. Once again my Christmas card is a simple SketchUp model, made with a randomizing script and the amazing MS Physics extension. It was then exported to Sketchfab where I enhanced all textures a bit and applied lighting....
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