Utilizing the Axes Class with the API

[DanRathbun]

@medeek

… when I set the axis to a new location (move it in the Z dir) it does not seem to make any difference to my API code when I generate geometry, is this by design ?

Yes. As a rule, the API team tries not to implement changes that affect or change code out “in the wild”.

So they chose to implement this as a pseudo geometry context with a transformation that can be applied to the geometry (vertices, edges, faces, etc.,) that your tool creates.

So, it is you and your code that need to decide when to honor the user’s drawing axes setting.
Ie, from my post of 11 days ago …

@DanRathbun

@McGordon

The model’s axes have been moved too.

In reality, the model’s axis and origin (ie the “global” axis) cannot be moved in SketchUp.
They are set to the global constants ORIGIN , X_AXIS , Y_AXIS and Z_AXIS .

What you may refer to (being moved) is the “ drawing axis ”, which is a user coordinate system similar to AutoCAD’s UCS. It affects how SketchUp’s native tools work, and any Ruby tool that takes it into account since it’s properties were exposed to the Ruby API with the 2016 release.

This means that the setting for the drawing axis does not affect Ruby coordinates unless the Ruby code chooses to honor it’s settings. All coordinates (outside group or components) are relative to the unchangeable global origin and axis. (This is why the component origin seemed to be way off.)

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Note also that I filed an issue for a missing reset() method.
(See the issue thread for a couple of workaround ideas.)

• API Issues: Sketchup::Axes#reset()

… and an enhancement to the Sketchup::Axes#set() method …

• API Issues: SketchUp::Axes#set() will not directly take the array output from SketchUp::Axes#to_a()