Ruby Scripts
What's a Ruby script, you ask? Basically, Google provides a way for people to make their own plugins for SketchUp. These plugins are just mini-programs (scripts) written in a computer programming language called Ruby. The best thing about Ruby scripts (Rubies, for short) is that you don't have to know anything about Ruby, or programming in general, to use ones that other people have created.
To install Rubies, you just drop them into a special folder on your computer:
1 Windows: C:/Program Files/Google/Google SketchUp 6/ Plugins
1 Mac:Hard Drive/Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 6/SketchUp/Plugins
The next time you launch SketchUp, Rubies you put in the preceding location become available for you to use. How you use them depends on what they do. They might show up on one of the toolbar menus or on your right-click context menu. The more complex ones even come with their own little toolbars. Helpfully, most Rubies also come with a set of instructions that tells you how to use them.
Luckily for those of us who aren't programmers, plenty of smart folks out there develop and (in some cases) sell Rubies that anyone can use. Smustard.com (www.smustard.com) is a Web site run by a few of these smart folks. You can choose from dozens of helpful Rubies that add functionality to SketchUp, and best of all, they're very inexpensive. Here are some of my favorites:
1 Weld: This Ruby takes edges you've selected and "welds" them together to make a single edge that you can select with a single click. This is super-handy when you're using Follow Me.
1 PresentationBundle: This is a package of five Rubies that help you use scenes to create better presentations. You can customize the transition time between individual scenes, for instance, and even create really elaborate fly-by animations.
1 CAD cleanup scripts: If you routinely import 2D CAD drawings to use as a starting point for SketchUp models, you need these scripts. Cleaning up imported CAD drawings is a real drag, but the following Rubies make the whole process immeasurably easier:
• StrayLines: Run this script to figure out how much work you'll have to do to a CAD file after you've imported it — it goes through and labels stuff you'll probable have to fix.
• CloseOpens: Imported CAD drawings almost always have one glaring problem: Their edges don't meet precisely, which means that you can't create faces. You end up hunting around with the Zoom tool, looking for all the tiny gaps and filling them in. Yuck. This script does it for you, which makes it worth a lot more than Smustard charges for it.
• MakeFaces: When you import a 2D CAD drawing, you get edges but not faces. Trouble is, you need faces for working in SketchUp, so you end up retracing a bazillion little lines to make faces appear. Run this Ruby, and you don't have to.
• IntersectOverlaps: You know how edges that cross don't automatically cut each other? If you use this script they will. Be careful to read the instructions (on the Web site); this Ruby can cause some unexpected results.
• Flatten: Sometimes (who knows why), imported CAD lines don't all come in lying on the ground. You probably want them to be (so that they're all coplanar), and this Ruby makes sure that they are.
• DeleteShortLines: When people make CAD drawings, they often accidentally overshoot their targets, creating hundreds of tiny, annoying edge segments that you need to get rid of in SketchUp.
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