We’ve all heard it before, “If you can’t do it with SketchUp, there is an extension that can!” But, where do these extensions come from? Who makes them? And how are they made?
This episode of Sketchup Talk dives deep into the history of extensions and talks about exactly who makes these wonderful bits of code that allow you to take your Sketchup usage to the next level!
Plus, we get a chance to talk with legendary SketchUp Extension developer, Thomthom, and learn what makes him tick (and by tick, we mean, develop extensions, of course).
To get technical, extensions are a subset of plugins in the SketchUp universe. Every Ruby file loaded with SketchUp is a plugin, but you have to follow certain rules to avoid clashes and register metadata such as name and version to SketchUp to make it an extension. At this time, pretty much every plugin out there is also an extension, but it doesn’t have to be.
I’m writing this just because @thomthom said in the video something like “it’s a good time to send ideas for a future version of Vertex Tools”. Well, I have a feature suggestion for VT 2020
Basically is a tool I call “circlefy”. The idea comes from a 3ds MAX tutorial by Xoio, to simplify/clean a topology. As far as I’ve tried, it’s usually easier to resolve the topology of a circle than the topology of an irregular face.
Here’s how it should work
By the way, keep these podcast episodes coming, please! Thank you so much!
Suggestion bagged and tagged. I need to dive a bit more into what this do.
Does it project all vertices to a sphere in the size of the largest side of the boundingbox of the selected entities? Then interpolate that projection with a percentage?
I take it that this can create some pretty weird geometry in cases of selecting complex 3d shapes?
Well, I don’t how how easy/hard could be what I’m proposing to implement, so forgive me for any crazy stuff I can say or suggest and thank you for listening!
About 3d shapes, I agree it can generate some unexpected scenarios, that’s the reason I stand for a circlefy (2D) instead a spherify (3D) tool. The result of using this tool should be a 2D intersection between a sphere and an average plane surface, so maybe it should be avaliable only after using the flatten tool.
The center of the circle should be at the center of the unaligned selection. And the radius of the circle should be a VCB value set by the user, but some average length with a percentage could also work.
nice
