Reversing Faces

Gully Foyle, over on the Google Help Forum, has posted a great idea to speed up the tedious process of reversing faces.

In the post, it is pointed out that the Push/Pull Tool is unique in that it selects entities when you simply hover the mouse over them. By assigning a shortcut key to Reverse Faces, you can select the Push/Pull Tool, hover over the face you want to reverse, and press the shortcut. Ingenious!

UPDATE: I've since heard from Gully that he was not the thinker-upper of this idea, rather he remembered reading it in the Pro Forum.

Great Image Viewer

I found this great image viewer (freeware) from FastStone. Small, fast, and free - what else do you want? Now go check it out yourself.

Drawing Effeciently With Shortcuts

The idea is to minimize the distance your hands need to travel while selecting the most common tools you use.

Keep your right hand on the mouse. The only exception is entering values in the VCB. (You are right-handed, aren't you?)

Your left hand should be confined to the left-half of the keyboard, pinky on the shift key. I suggest these shortcuts:

• Shift-space => Pencil Tool
• h => Edit/Hide
  
• Shift-H => Edit/Unhide/All
  
• g => Make Group
  
• Shift-G => Make Component
• Shift-C => Toggle Components Window
  
• Shift-E => Erase Guidelines (construction geometry)
• Shift-A => Protractor Tool (think A for Angle)
• Shift-S => PushPull Tool
• Shift-Z => Zoom Extents (I use zoom_selection.rb, a custom zoom tool.)
  
• Shift-F => FollowMe Tool
• d => Edit/Delete
• x => Explode
• Alt-1 => ISO View
• Alt-2 => Top View
• Alt-3 => Front View

I have tried other combinations, but I keep coming back to these.

You can import these directly into SketchUp by downloading Preferences.dat

Zoom Selection

Zoom Selection is a ruby plugin for SketchUp 6 that will perform a Zoom Extents on all the selected entities or, if nothing is selected, perform a Zoom Extents on the entire model. I use the 'z' to zoom to the selection's extents, and Shift-Z to zoom to the model extents.

Download zoom_selection.rb

Installation:
Copy or move the zoom_selection.rb file into the Sketchup Plugins directory. Restart SketchUp.

Plugin: OBJ Importer

Update Dec 28, 2010 - TIG's OBJ Importer, based on this code, is likely a more robust plugin.

• This is a basic importer for .obj files.
• It works sometimes, but not all the time.
• The .obj needs to be fairly well formed.
  
• It does not support textures.
  
• SketchUp is unusable during import.
• larger files can take a long time.
  

obj_importer.rb




There are 2 options: Import and Import as Mesh

• Import reads the file and creates faces one by one.
  
• As Mesh allocates a Mesh object, and creates smoothed edges. It can be slightly faster.

SketchUp 3D Warehouse Search

Assign a keyboard shortcut to do a quick search on the 3D Warehouse within SketchUp.

3dw_search.rb

Plagiarist of the Week

I'm thinking of exposing the models on the 3D Warehouse that don't give credit to the original creator (using the ratings.) I think a plagiarist deserves a "poor" rating. What do you think?