Determine camera location

Is it possible to interrogate the system to find out data about the current view? In particular, the position of the camera and the eye height. I know you can set both these things in advance but if you pan around something and then want to know the information about the view when you stop, can you do it?

Camera Stats from the Sketchucation Extension Store? Haven’t tried it in years and not on Mac but maybe.

On MS Windows there is a secret camera dialog.

Sketchup.send_action( 10624 )

This is what it looks like …


I thought someone had tried to create a clone that also ran on Mac. (Dave might have pointed you to it.)

Of course there are Ruby API methods to get this information.

I was hoping someone might pop up with an extension if it wasn’t possible natively and obviously you are first out of the blocks as usual, Dave! I’ll check it out, cheers.

Doubtless but way beyond my pay grade!

I suspect this extension does what I need but it takes a bit of understanding. I guess it’s the Eye position that I am after. So in this example, it returns 1581,-312,158 (ignoring decimals). As an eye height, 1581 is plausible but I am not sure whether the other two record the X and Y co-ordinates. It’s quite an old extension that has seen no activity on Sketchucation since 2012 but it still works on a Mac and SU 2019. I can’t find much to explain what the various bits of data mean but I suspect it is probably all there.

The reason I am interested is that there are some roof elements on the attached sketch that only become visible at a certain point as you go round the building. I wanted to know where that point was as it may convince planners they don’t need to fuss about it.

Did you read the topic thread ?
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=241192#p241192

Co-ordinates are always given in X, Y, Z. So the height is 158 above ground plane (ignoring decimals.)

You could use the Advanced Camera Tools to place cameras at the desired locations. Then zoom out to show them.

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Does that sound plausible? It would be about 6" above ground, what you might call a worm’s eye view.

I’ll try that too.

I’ve never run his plugin so I do not know if he is displaying the values in model units or hardset to inches.

Those units are SketchUp’s default inches…

Sketchup.active_model.active_view.camera.eye

will return the camera’s eye point, in current model units in the Ruby Console…

You can also get the target etc by substituting other methods like
...camera.target

Sketchup.active_model.active_view.camera.methods.sort
in the Ruby Console reports all available methods…

158 inches is 13 feet 2 inches (approx. 4.013 m)

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That would put eye line up near the eaves so I’m not sure that sounds right either. Assuming it is, though, do we know what the X and Y coordinates relate to? Are they meant to be relative to the origin?

Having tried it, I think this is the best solution for my purposes as I can measure the camera position both vertically and horizontally in relation to anything I like, such as the building the camera is pointing at. Thanks, Dave.

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Thonthoms CameraTools: Tool View Camera

Before:

After:

To save me installing and testing, does this do anything that Advanced Camera Tools doesn’t?