Hi everyone.
I’m looking for a particular sphere-making plugin originally developed by Jim Foltz. Here’s the link. I really liked this plugin because unlike the official one from SketchUp this one was interactive and you didn’t have to enter parameters in a separate dialog box and could preview what you’re drawing.
The download link doesn’t work anymore, as the plugin dates back to 2010, so I was wondering if anyone perhaps had old copies left, that they could share? I notice Jim Foltz is credited under the SketchUp Shapes plugin page for contribution but his version of the sphere tool is not anywhere to find.
Alternatively, does anyone know of a similar “interactive” tool?
Thank you.
P.S. @jim_foltz If you’re the Jim Foltz who developed the plugin, I’d be so thankful to hear from you.
For anyone in the future coming to this thread and looking for a solution:
There’s a brand new plugin, that has almost the same functionality.
Sphere in SketchUp by TheSketchUpDude allows you to interactively create a sphere in SketchUp by clicking and dragging, without any dialog boxes or extra inputs.
It’s been 7 years since I made this post but I’m happy to share that we can now mark this as resolved.
I’m glad you’ve found a tool that suits you, but I must admit I have never seen the point of using a plugin for a sphere.
People go on about how hard it is and how you need extra dialogs and follow me is guess work etc
Drag out a circle the size you want with the number of segments you want, center another circle on the first one and follow me, done.
This would be even quicker using two hands and shortcuts but I had a beer in the other hand.
Each to their own I guess. However, I must say I personally never liked that workaround. It’s neither a “standard” nor “expected” way to create a sphere in a 3D program. It should not take juggling 3 native tools and 12 clicks to create something so primitive (9 clicks to get the sphere + 3 further to clean up residual geometry).
Every other industry standard 3D modelling program has a dedicated tool for creating a sphere (Blender, 3ds Max, Maya, AutoCAD, Pcon, Rhino) - all except SketchUp.
I’ve had the chance to teach SKP to over a hundred people, both young and professionals. Showing the Follow-Me workaround causes frowning and raised eyebrows every single time, especially among the younger generation.
Long-time users don’t see anything wrong with this, but just to paint a picture: a new unknowing user will never in a milion years come to this workaround on their own, without a dedicated tutorial. Most of the tools in SketchUp are very intuitive. They can play with them and guess the function without outside help. However, juggling Follow-Me, Select and Circle tools will never cross their minds on its own. That is unintuitive UX design that should hopefully be addressed in a future update.
Looong ago there was a Parametric script available from the Draw menu - to draw a range of 3d objects, with a simple input dialog for radius / sizes etc, and those objects could be edited later using the context-menu.
It’s available from SketchUcation: it still works, but is a bit clunky - it could be the basis of something simple and useful ? https://sketchucation.com/pluginstore?pln=jwm_shapes
It’s been some years, but I helped John fix various problems in that extension. I think parts of it came from @thomthom too. If there are specific ideas of how to improve it, I’ll take a look - not right away, but perhaps later this summer.
A “sphere” script would perhaps be more useful if it used a different topology model than what can easily be achieved with native tools, more like a geodesic 3D polygon or some other way to make the form more uniform..
It certainly needs some modernization - it is 12 years or so old ! ‘Some’ issues - it’s not signed, RB file name doesn’t match subfolder name [preventing signing] [if fixed old RB file needs auto-deleting when the new code first loads], default parameters seem odd, etc. But nothing that’s not fix-able… Good luck.
I rewrote that extension and added Modus style UI and some shapes (star prism, chamfered box and truncated pyramid, if I recall).
I could make it available but I don’t know if my attributions to the original contributors is correct (I added my name to the list), or if I can do that in the EW/SketchUcation/Github. It is copyrighted (with MIT License). Is there a proper etiquette about these things?
That’s the original 2014 version 2.1 that John continued to update but didn’t push the changes to github. The one at SketchUcation is a newer version 2.65 of the same code. It lists John and me as copyright holders, so if anyone wants to mess with it, I hereby grant permission.
BTW for those who didn’t know, John passed away last year.
