Create Building Plans

I’m working on a tool to draw and quote buildings.

I was wondering if it’s possible to create plans in Layout using only code.

I would have preferred to create plans in SketchUp, but I haven’t figured out how to do clear text and dimensions. Also printing to scale can be difficult. Attached is a sample model, to give an idea what I’m trying to do.Pole Building Detailed.skp (558.0 KB)

Here are some plans similar to what I’m trying to achieve.
Exported Plans.pdf

I have played around with the SDK command line example GenerateLayoutFromSkp and can call it from ruby…

I’ve only compiled and ran it on a mac so I’m unsure if the Windows version is similar and/or available…

if the SU Extension [in the Warehouse] gets you half way there then tweaking your own version should be possible…

john

John,

I haven’t looked at that. Is it similar this?

As you know the real problem isn’t getting the drawing into layout. The real challenge is all the text labels and dimensions. And then of course printing.

I need to be able to select ‘Print Build Drawings’ or ‘Print Permit Plans’… and create all the correct plans and print them using dynamically entered user input.

Maybe this isn’t possible.

As far as the C SDK, I haven’t dappled with them because I don’t have any C programing experience :frowning:

no that sends one page to one layout file…

Create Layout File is the one worth testing [only works on v15/v16]…

the SDK examples contain variants of that one and can be compiled for v17…

for my test I wrote a simple ruby that sets the Template and skp file and calls the ‘command line tool’ make the .layout file…

I didn’t do any C programming, just compiled it for my mac…

If I find the .rb I’ll post it…

john

That is nice, but I’m not sure it’s going to give me the functionality I’m looking for.

It would be really if the user could select ‘Print Plans’, and the papers would come out of the printer with no further interaction.

Here is the result of the above extension. As you can see it’s difficult in SketchUp to get dimension text to be the right size. what if the building is 80’ X 160’ instead of 24’ x 24’. Now instead of being too big you probably can’t read the text. It would be nice to do everything including printing from within SketchUp.