This version comes with a few enhancements to satisfy both user bases: Geo-modelers (who create buildings and objects for Google Earth) and planners/designers (who model all kinds of objects in 3D). Here is a brief list of new features:

• The following features integrate already existing Google data and services closer into SketchUp. This will aid nicely in creating and refining geo-located buildings.
  • Model geo-location with Google Maps
  • Color imagery and more accurate terrain
  • Match Photo improvements
  • Building Maker
• Solid Tools – Although it should be noted that SketchUp does not include “solids” in a classic CAD sense now (it is still “only” a surface modeler), this set of tools adds a variety of boolean operations (union, subtract, intersect etc.) to the SketchUp toolset. The only downside: while this is an exciting addition, it is only available for Pro users.
  
• A feature that should make users happy is that now toolbar locations can be saved and restored. This does not fix the nagging toolbar reshuffling that happens occasionally but it offers a fix for when it happens.
• Outer Shell - This feature discards all internal geometry of a shape. It will be very useful for reducing geometry for geo-modeling (and Google Earth upload) as well as 3D printing.
• A new toolbar to facilitate setting the north angle (the image also shows the new “face” of version 8: Susan!
  
• Updated DWG/DXF 2010 import/export – Another Pro-only feature (remember that this was removed from the free version with the 7.1 release).
• And some nice-to-have additions:
  • Scene Thumbnails – This makes reorganizing scenes much easier
  • Back Edges – These can now be shown dashed right in SketchUp
  • Push/Pull pre-selected faces – This makes the Push-pull tool behave more like the other editing tools
  • Calculate volumes - This comes with the new solid (“manifold geometry”) tools. Should be useful for calculating concrete volume etc.
• LayOut also got some new features:
  • Angular Dimensions – To complete the available dimensioning tools
  • Dashed Lines are configurable
  • Precise Move
• The SketchUp Ruby API got enhanced with several new methods that deal with the new manifold geometry (“solid”) tools. It should also be noted that the Ruby engine that drives many plugins got updated. More on that should be on this page soon.

You can watch a short video overview of the new tools below. There is also a nice, official blog post and a website (and some release notes – and even more) to read through.

Although there are lots of great new features, I am still missing others that would have justified the new major release number (8 as opposed to 7.2) a little better. My personal favorite would have been a better way to deal with plugins. The extension capability through Ruby plugins is such a major feature of SketchUp (especially given many recent, powerful plugins) that a better plugin management – including a version-checking and updating function – would have provided a useful, broadly-aimed feature. After all, this idea was rated second-highest on last year’s product ideas list.

Leaving my pet-peeve request aside, release #8 delivers quite a few interesting new features and improvements that offer something new and useful for every kind of user.

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With more than 25,000 documents already uploaded into the system, Autodesk wants to position Project Butterfly as the “Google Docs for AutoCAD”. Beyond being able to edit an AutoCAD drawing online (which by itself is a great feature), these are the collaboration options:

• Share a DWG file for editing, redlining or just viewing. Various options allow for control of sharing parameters determining who sees what. It is also possible to revoke permissions as needed (for example after bidding on a project has ended).
• Crop a view and share only a portion of a file. This cuts down on clutter when sharing large documents.
• Co-editing and chat. Multiple users can edit the same file synchronously. As an added benefit, collaborators can bring up a handy chat window to talk about what they are doing.
  
• Share any file in Butterfly’s file browser. This would allow using Butterfly’s web space as a central document repository (organized e.g. per project). Given the (current?) promise of unlimited webspace, this is a great plus. One feature that I am still missing here is versioning for non-DWG files, but that may be on the horizon. Also, at this point, non-DWG and non-image files can only be downloaded, not viewed online. It should at least be possible to open a PDF file in a separate window. There may also be an opportunity for inclusion of another Google service (Docs!) here.
  

Another very interesting new feature is the inclusion of Google Maps. At this point, a Google Map view can be underlaid under a drawing and scaled to the drawing’s dimensions. This even allows for use of Butterfly as a lightweight GIS viewer, where layer-based features (e.g. utility lines) can be viewed together with topography information and orthophotos. Unfortunately scaling is not based on the model dimensions (which shouldn’t be too hard to implement) and positioning should be coordinate-based to make this a more precise tool. But at least it offers great opportunity for visualization of anything from sewer pipes to building floorplans.

One question that will be central for most users is data fidelity: “Will the content of my uploaded file be fully preserved when I download the edited file?” Autodesk’s answer is that the uploaded file gets processed by their RealDWG engine. Once a download is requested, changes made in Butterfly will then be merged into the original file and the result will be served, which should preserve all original data. Unfortunately I haven’t had a chance to try this out, so feel free to leave any comments on this process below if you have.

Another important point is data security. Unfortunately this is not clearly visible at the moment. When a user logs on, he/she does so on a page that isn’t SSL-secured (the “s” is missing on the “http”). So it isn’t immediately clear that uploading proprietary company files happens over a secure connection. As Weiss outlined, a lack of SSL encryption is inconsequential since the only component transferred over http is the Flash-viewer. All uploading and downloading happens through a secure and encrypted connection within the Flash environment. Also, data is stored on Amazon’s S3 servers that are used by many online services.

When I asked about Autodesk’s 3D software (like Revit or Inventor), I was told that the current focus of Butterfly is on AutoCAD users but that in the future, expanding this platform vertically (literally and figuratively) into 3D is an option. At this point, the most likely use scenario with these programs is to export a DWG, then import it into Butterfly for collaboration and editing and then link the DWG back into the 3D software to make edits manually.

I am curious to see how Autodesk incorporates this online branch into their desktop software. I am sure, we’ll soon see an “Export to Butterfly” button. Hopefully this will offer some functionality to link and merge files easily. In any case, Butterfly will likely not be as freely accessible to everyone as it is now in its beta stage. It would be great, though, if basic functionality like viewing DWG/DWF files and markup/measurement would remain free. That would offer an alternative to installing numerous viewers and would be in line with Autodesk’s Design Review product philosophy.

Similar to my older post, I’ll end this post with a wishlist (use the feature request button in Butterfly to submit yours):

• Support American units (feet and inches).
• More precise positioning and scaling in the Google Map view.
• File versioning for non-DWG files and online viewing of office- and PDF files.
• File>New. This would allow Butterfly to work ass a basic no-installation CAD software.

You can find out more about Project Butterfly here:

• http://butterfly.autodesk.com/ – Try it out for yourself
• http://autodeskbutterfly.wordpress.com/ – The official blog
• http://www.youtube.com/autodeskbutterfly – Youtube channel

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Let me make this point clear first: I fully understand that professional-grade software packages are complex and extensive. They use high-powered computation and extensive libraries and therefore need resources. But my goodness – does Autodesk ever fill up my hard disk!

Now that the spring semester is coming to a close, it is time for me to again look at the upcoming software releases that are to be used for teaching and will be installed in our computer labs. Since Autodesk recently released the 2011 lineup of their software (and in the meantime has posted them on the student community as well), I needed to look at the system requirements for all of them. The resources required to run their software are mind-blowing! Apparently every but one Autodesk software package requires more than 1 Gigabyte of space on the harddisk. Several packages even require 5 GB or more.

The one laudable exemption to this resource-guzzling lineup is Ecotect Analysis, the building energy analysis program, originally developed by Square1. Maybe in tune with its goal of lowering environmental footprints of buildings, it is notably small.

Let’s see how long Ecotect will be able to stay small. Yes, its graphics engine could use some tuning and at least in the 2010 version, the famous ribbon wasn’t there yet but please, Autodesk, don’t overdo it on the bloat in future development.

If you take a closer look at the Autodesk Revit installation (the 2010 version in my case), you’ll notice that most of the space is taken by the Rendering support files and the family library. The image below shows the file types and as can be expected the single largest file is a sky environment: “hemispherical_002_half_tiled.exr”.

List created with WinDirStat

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I just posted an update to the SketchUp Ruby Code Editor. It now sports buttons instead of text, which makes it easier to use on a small screen. It also has three new buttons: One to explore the current selection, one to explore attributes of the current selection and a third to display the Ruby console on the fly. These features make working with what is already in the model a bit easier.

In addition to this, I also added a button that allows you to check for updates.

You can download it now from the project page.

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It is spring again and the Revit web is as much abuzz with postings about the new Revit version (2011) as there are fresh buds on our tree in the garden. Based on what I have seen so far on Revit3D.com and elsewhere, I am very much looking forward to the new version. To whet your appetite, too, sit back and watch a bunch of release videos from Autodesk on their YouTube channel:

http://www.youtube.com/AutodeskBuilding

Some of my favorite new features are:

• Modeless properties palette (finally!)
• Better 3D alignment
• Inclusion of structural tools
• Conceptual design improvements
• Autodesk Revit DB link
• Visual sun path simulation
• New view styles (including ambient occlusion)
• Various API enhancements

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In this section, we’ll start creating scripted geometry in SketchUp. In this and all following posts, I’ll approach SketchUp scripting in a pragmatic way. This means that I don’t think every step in the process should be scripted – after all, I am not writing a plugin. I’ll only script what can’t efficiently be modeled by hand and I’ll use standard SketchUp modeling tools to finish up a project.

Before you get going, make sure you have read the first installment of this series and have the latest version of the Ruby Code Editor installed.

Creating geometry is pretty easy with the SketchUp Ruby API. In essence, you will be adding to the collection of entities in the current model. To do this, you can use any of these methods of the entities object:

Entities (Parent: Object)
.[] .add_3d_text .add_arc .add_circle
.add_cline .add_cpoint .add_curve
.add_edges .add_face
.add_faces_from_mesh .add_group
.add_image .add_instance .add_line
.add_ngon .add_observer .add_text
.at .clear! .count .each .erase_entities
.fill_from_mesh .intersect_with .length
.model .parent .remove_observer
.transform_by_vectors
.transform_entities

Once you get a hold of the entities collection using the following line, simply add to the collection whatever you need.

entities = Sketchup.active_model.entities

To get us started, let’s create a 3D grid of regularly spaced boxes. In the following little bit of code, we’ll define a number of boxes per axis (“n”), a box spacing (“s”) and a box width (“w”). Please note: All lengths are entered as numbers, which means that they default to inches. If you need to use other units, write dimensions like this:

s = "1m".to_l

Paste the following code into the Ruby Code Editor in SketchUp and click on “Run Code”:

# Creates a 3D grid of boxes

entities = Sketchup.active_model.entities

n = 5
s = 100
w = 20

(0..n-1).each { |i|
  (0..n-1).each { |j|
    (0..n-1).each { |k|
      face = entities.add_face [i*s,j*s,k*s],[i*s,j*s+w,k*s],[i*s+w,j*s+w,k*s],[i*s+w,j*s,k*s]
      face.pushpull -w
    }
  }
}

This will be the result:

While this gets the job done, it is not very efficient. After all, we are creating geometry for each of the many boxes. In SketchUp, the approach that takes less computational effort and less space on the harddisk is usually to create one box, convert it to a component and then just insert component instances. Instead of saving a whole lot of geometry, only insertion points are then being saved. The following code does this by creating a grouped box, converting it into a component and then copying it multiple times using transformations.

# Creates a 3D grid of boxes using components

n = 5
s = 100
w = 20

entities = Sketchup.active_model.entities
group = Sketchup.active_model.entities.add_group
face = group.entities.add_face [0,0,0],[w,0,0],[w,w,0],[0,w,0]
face.pushpull -w
comp = group.to_component

(0..n).each { |i|
  (0..n).each { |j|
    (0..n).each { |k|
       transformation = Geom::Transformation.new([i*s,j*s,k*s])
       componentinstance = entities.add_instance(comp.definition, transformation)
    }
  }
}

I’ll cover transformations (move, copy, rotate, scale) in detail in a later post.

Scripting geometry becomes especially effective when we use a non-linear formula to define size, position etc. The next piece of code creates a rectangular grid of circles whose size is determined in two directions by a sine function.

Paste the following code into the Ruby Code Editor in SketchUp and click on “Run Code”:

# Creates a square panel with a sinusoidal hole pattern

entities = Sketchup.active_model.entities

width = 36
n = 10
s = width/(n+1).to_f

entities.add_face [0,0,0],[width,0,0],[width,width,0],[0,width,0]

(0..n-1).each { |i|
  (0..n-1).each { |j|
    entities.add_circle [s+i*s,s+j*s,0], [0,0,1], sin(i/(n-1).to_f*1*PI)*s/5.0+sin(j/(n-1).to_f*1*PI)*s/5.0
  }
}

Here’s the resulting panel after using the pushpull tool:

You can get creative with this little bit of code if you replace some of the “sin” functions with “cos” and also play with the factors that end up determining circle diameter (the last parameter in the “add_circle” method). A variation of this is shown in the topmost image in this post.

One thing that stumped me at first was Ruby’s reluctance to give me a floating point value after dividing two integers. That is the reason why you see “.to_f” in a few places in the code. This little snippet converts a number to a “float”. In addition, it may be possible that you need to add the Math class to the “sin” function. It works fine for me as shown but the long version would be:

Math.sin(x)

By the way: The best way to access the reference for the “add_circle” method while you are coding is of course the Reference Browser tab directly within the Ruby Code Editor:

Happy scripting!

Last in this series: Setup and basic ideas
Next in this series: More to follow soon…

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In this series of posts, I will be exploring how one can create scripted geometry in SketchUp. Traditionally, this has been more the realm of programs like Rhino. And justifiably so. Rhino is NURBS-based and can create and modify curved geometry much better than SketchUp. However, SketchUp is an easy-to-use program for working with polygon-mesh-based geometry. It also has a built-in scripting language (Ruby) and best of all – it’s free. So if you want to script SketchUp to automate small tasks or to create interesting geometry, then this may be a good series of posts to follow.

A word of warning: I will not talk about plugin development for SketchUp – although this may be the logical next step after starting to writing scripts for the program. This is discussed in more detail in the appropriate forums (SketchUcation‘s or Google‘s). I will also not go over basic principles of the Ruby language. That is covered well elsewhere, too. By the way: A great reference is O’Reilly’s $10 reference book on Ruby. And for navigating the SketchUp API, there is of course my SketchUp Ruby Cheatsheet.

The order of these posts is mainly dependent on how I am using the software at the moment. Nevertheless, I will keep the examples as generic as possible so that you can modify them easily to suit your case.

Okay, time to get this started. To begin, download SketchUp if you haven’t done so. This will work fine with the free version but you may want to consider the Pro version if you want to add the capability to print plans or load DWG/DXF geometry. Then install my Ruby Code Editor. Follow the instructions on the website, then re-start SketchUp and the editor menu item will appear under the plugins menu. Here are the links:

• Get SketchUp (Windows or Mac version)
• Get the Ruby Code Editor

You can then try out the editor by loading the “create tubes.rb” file from the snippets folder. This is a textfile with Ruby code instructions. You can execute the code by clicking on the “Run Code” button. Tada! The following image shows what you should see in your model:

Afterwards, click on the “Undo” button to see how you can undo the entire code execution.

Now we’re good to go. Before I post the next clip, play around with the editor and explore its functionality a bit.

By the way: This series will use the SketchUp Ruby API methods that are built into SketchUp. There are plugin developments underway that may simplify some of the tasks and make Ruby scripting simpler. One of these is the alternate API (“Sketch Talk”) that is discussed on this website.

For your reference, these are some webpages that may help you along the way:

• SketchUp Ruby API documentation
• SketchUp Ruby API tutorials
• Martin Reinhart’s Edges to Rubies E-book (especially starting at Chapter 11)

Next in this series: Creating geometry

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I finally fixed some problems and added new features to my SketchUp Ruby Code Editor. The result is a 1.1 version that is now available for download. The changes are:

• Changed webdialog internal name for compatibility
• Better looking dropdowns under IE Win
• Fixed save filename preselect problem
• Better code execution and error catching (thanks to Dan Rathbun)
• Faster file loading for large files
• Added cookie-based saving of preferences
• Added options panel
• Added changeable user interface
• Modified some references, added tutorial link

The image above shows the dark user interfaces. The editor comes with three different ones, so take your pick.

To download the new version, go to my project page.

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I always found Ruby code editing and testing for SketchUp a bit tedious. First I write code in my preferred text editor: PSPad. Then I load it into SketchUp using my plugin loader. And then I run it from the menu. Although there are better ways to handle this (e.g. the SketchUp bridge), I wanted something more “in-house”. Enter Jim Folz’s Web Console.

Jim’s plugin has been a tremendous tool for testing multiline code right within SketchUp. Nevertheless, it was lacking the code-editor functionality that external editors offer.

While my plugin does not provide a full code-editor for SketchUp Ruby files (with e.g. syntax highlighting), it is pretty good at making it easier to edit code. At this point, it features font-size, tabulation and snippet support. On top of that, it contains a nicely usable reference web browser. Finish that off with some jQuery UI shinyness and there you have it – a whole new way to edit code in SketchUp. Enjoy!

You can find more information and download the plugin here:

http://www.alexschreyer.net/projects/sketchup-ruby-code-editor

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Autodesk Butterfly Screenshot

Extending their lineup of beta-version web-editors, Autodesk just released Project Butterfly. After Project Draw (drawing and diagramming), Project Dragonfly (space planning in isometric 3D), Project Showroom (rendered previews of interior design selections), their latest addition to the labs (the Butterfly) is an online DWG-editor. Made by an acquired company (Visual Tao) and Autodesk, this web service is basically a web-based lightweight AutoCAD.

So far (after trying a few file uploads) it has been working well for me. And save for a few missing features, it works as a basic DWG editor. Some of its features are:

• Online editing of uploaded DWG files
• Download in various DWG versions
• Editing and geometry creation
• Timeline history of changes
• Sharing and collaborative editing

This video nicely illustrates some features:

Here’s my wishlist (for now): hatch editing, right-click “Properties”, object property viewer, redline markup.

Link:

• http://butterfly.autodesk.com/
• http://autodeskbutterfly.wordpress.com/

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