Style Thumbnailer (Batch Style Exporter)

I should have this ready on Thursday (5/23) Sorry for the delay.

It exports the current Scene once for each In Model Style. No other options at this time.

I want to get it out, get some feedback, and debug the basic functionality before adding features.

It uses the Save dialog to select a directory as a directory browser work-around. It's a little clumsy, but it works. The image filenames are constructed using [model_name]-[scene_name]-[style_name].jpg. The export from the image below would create the 5 files shown in the 2nd image.



Download .zip archive. There are a few slight changes compared to the images.

Cannonball

Just playing with a little animation demo. Here's link to a video (603k)

Cannonball

Debugging WebDialogs

This little piece of code let's you see the source of a WebDialog, but includes any dynamically (javascript) created content. Normally, using View Source on a Dialog only shows you the original html file you defined. Very useful for WebDialog debugging.

http://billfriedrich.tripod.com/index.html?Web

Texture Slider

More WebDialog slider R&D:

Camera Field of View Slider

Experimenting with WebDialogs in SketchUp.

Using Ruby Libraries from SketchUp

I found this short plugin - it's an RSS reader plugin for SketchUp. Why, you ask? I have no idea, but the author uses some interesting techniques worth noting.


$LOAD_PATH << 'C:\ruby\lib\ruby\1.8'

This line appends the ruby library path to SketchUp Ruby's global $LOAD_PATH variable. Now, SU will look in the appended folder for required files; as demonstrated by the next 2 lines:

require 'rss/1.0'
require 'rss/2.0'

...
The other interesting thing the author does is use open-uri to open and read a document from the Internet into a string:

source = `ruby -r 'open-uri' -e 'puts open("#{uri}").read'`

This code calls the external ruby to do the work. The -r option is equivalent to "require 'open-uri'". The -e means execute the following stuff. So, SketchUp's built-in Ruby is executing the external ruby, which prints the web page to standard out. The ` (backtick?) command in Ruby captures the output, which is then assigned to the "source" variable inside SketchUp. Clever.

Note that instead of the backticks, the author could have used:

%x{ ... }

which is synonymous with the ` ... ` syntax. I would recommend using this syntax as it will help avoid too-many-quotes syndrome.

Here's another example:

page=%x{ruby -r 'uri' -r 'net/http' -e 'Net::HTTP.get_print URI.parse("http://www.google.com/")'}

which you can probably guess what it does.

Although this technique does work, I don't think it's an optimal solution. First off, you will need to have the full Ruby installed on your computer, and there's no guarantee that your plugin's users will have it.

SketchUp Ruby Classes Doc Sidebar for Firefox

If you use Firefox, you can specify whether or not a bookmark is to be opened in a sidebar. Simply right click on the bookmark and select Properties from the pop-up menu. Then, enable the "load this book mark in a sidebar" check box, and click OK.

To get the sketchup Ruby API class index into a sidebar, bookmark this link, then enable the sidebar option as described above.

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