Things have been a little slow on the plugin development and also on visits to my plugin page the last few days as I have been busy working on some local engineering projects and have not had the time to work on any new features.
Then all of sudden this morning I noticed things were going a little wild on the site with a ton of traffic. Turns out my plugin has somehow found its way to the top of the stack on Extension Warehouse:
[quote=“medeek, post:121, topic:16452”]
Not sure how it ended up there but my server has registered a serious uptick in traffic.
[/quote]It was featured in a Sketchup mailshot yesterday; I’m guessing that’s the reason
That would be it, I just found the newsletter in my email this morning. That was really nice of them to feature it. I just hope I don’t upset to many potential users of the plugin by having them feature it so early on in its development.
I’m stilling working on the hip roof beveled cuts. So far this has been one of the more challenging obstacles I have encountered so far but I think I’ve got it figured out.
Note, the birdsmouth cut at the lower bearing point. What I am not showing is the additional web blocking (stiffeners) required at this bearing point and at the ridge beam, see TJI-4000 for more details.
I have also included all of the TJI sizes 110 thru 560D so there are plenty of options.
The tails of the TJI joists at the overhangs is left untrimmed however it is very easy to trim the tail of the rafters as shown below to customize to your particular roof requirements.
I still need to add in the advanced options for this roof type (sheathing, fascia etc…) I’m also thinking about ceiling joists and how best to configure them. For low pitch hip roofs the ceiling joists near the hip ends will clash with the hip jack rafters unless they are oriented parallel to the jack rafters.
I initially generated the hip roofs (two rectangles) and then deleted the appropriate members and trimmed the common rafters to create the valley jack rafters and cripple jack rafters. The valley rafter was created by copying an instance of one of the hip rafters and moving it into place. The end result is:
Overall the process has been simplified by having the hip roof feature in the plugin. Trimming the members is the most time consuming, perhaps a more efficient trim tool can be devised so that intersecting members can be easily trimmed back to clean up a complex roof. Ultimately it would be cool to have the plugin automatically handle even more complex roofs such as this but that would take some serious programming.
Also note that I used a raised heel for the trusses so that the heel height and gutter line of the trusses matches that of the rafters.
The thing that jumps out at me right away is the ease with which I can generate the basic roof lines and most of the rafters. This particular roof required (4) rectangular roofs to generate all of the lines. The only thing that is missing is the valley rafters. To make this feature more functional for complex roofs I only need to have a tool that can generate valley rafters and trim back members to create the cripple rafters.
This is unrelated to the functionality of the plugin but I managed after two days of pulling my hair out to somehow get the PayPal Express Checkout to work on the site. A number of clients had been requesting the PayPal option rather than use their credit cards over the internet.
Looking at cantilevered trusses tonight. The use of a wedge, slider or strut depends on the amount of the overhang and in some cases if the overhang (cantilever) is within the scarf cut of the top chord no additional member is required, see image below:
Notice how the web strut is centered over the point of bearing with the long cantilever. Also notice that the panel point placement of this fink truss was not altered with the addition of the cantilever.
Basically this will be a new truss family and I’ll start with the fink truss and take it from there. If anyone has shop drawing from truss plants they are willing to share that show different configurations of a cantilever truss, that would be very helpful.
When a new truss is created (common truss types only for now) the parameters are specified within the dynamic component attribute library. Opening the component options allows one to change some of these values.
The new engineering icon allows one to automatically transfer all of the truss design parameters directly from SketchUp to the Truss Designer for engineering checks.
The truss component in SketchUp is not fully dynamic yet, however if you right click on the actual truss component and open the Dynamic Component → Component Options dialog box you will see that you can change some options associated with the truss. The items grayed out you cannot currently change but I would like to try and make some of them dynamic as well.
if you make a change here and then proceed with the engineering you will notice the new values are then sent to the calculator. The dynamic attributes revealed in this dialog are what is being sent to the calculator for engineering.
So far I only have glulam beams as an option in the plugin but I will probably add LVL, LSL, PSL and Solid Sawn and those can also be analyzed with this same interface.
