Common SketchUp Questions (Pt.2) _ SketchUp Show #26 (Tutorial)

Alright, so then there was one more question, and I think this is the one you wanted to talk about today. Because it's been a while since we've talked about plugins, and not only have we been getting a lot of questions about, you know, do you guys have any other plugin recommendations or whatever we do, but also some of the settings have changed. The last time we talked about plugins we were back in SketchUp 5, now we're in SketchUp 6, so some of the directories are a little bit different. We'll talk about that in a minute, because first what I want to show is this plugin that every time I show it people are just like totally freaked out, and I've been wanting to show it during a SketchUp show for a while. It's called the Soap Skin Bubble, and we'll put a link to it or something on the website if you go to the forums, I'm sure we'll have something up there. We'll put it up above here, click right about there. Oh yeah, click up at the top too. So what this plugin lets you do, I'm just gonna kind of, actually you know what I could do is I could use another plugin, I don't know if we talked about this earlier, but I've got one that lets you draw bezier curves. They're not true spline curves, but you can kind of set the degree of control for the bezier spline, so it's still gonna be kind of an arc line with segments, you'll see that here in a second, but basically I just have it set to a degree node of 3, so it's a three point bezier, and I'll actually make another one of those here too, so back up to draw bezier curves, and I'll just put one like over here somewhere, okay, so right now these curves don't really have any kind of relationship to each other, I'm just gonna rotate this one around a little bit, and I'm actually gonna rotate this up too, just to kind of give it a little bit more dimension. And now as you said, these are plugins that didn't come with SketchUp, you got them from somewhere, we'll put those links for people to find out how to grab them. Okay, so here you go, I just gotta connect the endpoints, endpoint to endpoint, and then endpoint to endpoint. Now if you orbit around, those are no longer on the same plane, those bezier, they're kind of off in two different directions, and it's a very kind of curvy shape, right, and this is something that people freak out about all the time when they're in SketchUp, it's like, ugh, curves just kill me, I just can't seem to get these curves working for me. Okay, so I've got the whole outline selected, I connected the endpoints, got the whole outline selected, I'm gonna go over and click on this button here that says skin, there's a tool time limit, I hope, they've already extended this once, it used to be a 2007 limit, now it's 2008, I hope it just kind of keeps getting extended, because I love this tool, click on okay, thanks, and one of the first things it asks you for is a division, number of divisions, so you can type in 10, you can type in 15, hit enter, whatever, the one thing I will say is that this tool will create a ton of services, a ton of polygons, if you increase this number, you're gonna get a bigger file pretty quickly, but once you kind of have the number of divisions set, just hit enter, and you can just sit back, and this is like the coolest thing. It's cool, it's like it's modeling right in front of you, there's some statistics going on behind your... Yeah, it tells you how fast it does it in and all kinds of cool stuff, but you can see what it did is it just took those complex curved surfaces and kind of created this skin over them. Now what's great is the skin is a separate object, if I go over to the select tool I can select the skin, it's a separate group, so it kind of works in a similar way as the sandbox tools, when you create that skin it's a separate object, a separate group, you still have the profile behind over there so that if you wanted to edit that profile you could, but it gets better. Okay. Okay, so here's the skin. Okay. If I select that skin, I can go over and create a bubble for that skin and type in a pressure value, whether it's a positive pressure or a negative pressure, so I can go in here and I can type in like 50 and hit enter, and you just see it inflate. It's like a positive pressure of 50, I can type in 100 and hit enter, it gets even more inflated. And it just does it right on the fly there. And you just watch it happen, I mean if you've never seen a SketchUp model do this before it's totally mind blowing, if I go 200 it gets even bigger, right, so just like typing in a positive pressure it kind of inflates it. Can you bust the bubble? I've never done that before, but I have typed in values of like 1000 and it inflates back onto itself. Oh, okay, I see. It's pretty awesome. Actually, that's pretty interesting. Yeah. It sort of implodes on itself. It's really wild. I mean, the physics behind this thing are phenomenal. It's a really incredible tool. Typing in a positive number will inflate it, typing in a negative number will kind of bring it down. Deflate it, yeah. It's like adding that pressure onto the tensile structure. So there are some legitimate physics that are happening here. I've seen this used, applications like tensile structures like the Denver airport, like you know how that airport is like very much just a total tensile roof. I've used it on a couple of models. You did it on one model in particular that I wanted to show everybody out there. It's the DeYoung Museum. This one's been up there for a while. Yeah, I'm going to go to the 3D Warehouse. This one's been up there for some time. Let's type in DeYoung Museum. We did this one way back when, before Google Earth even supported texture. So it's not a textured model. It's just colors. Right, but you can see kind of that twisting spiral tower. Right, so you've got a building that kind of starts with a footprint here and ends here and it's got to kind of twist. Got the SketchUp model here too. This is from a while back. But when I go into that tower, you can kind of see the number of polygons. So again, like I mentioned earlier, it's not necessarily the most efficient method for generating surfaces. You get a bunch of polygons in there, but just the quality of that surface and its curve. Now before we're done today, I wanted to quickly show where we put this Soap Skin Bubble plug-in so that we could use it because it's different than in 5. Not this one, but all of them. All of the plug-ins for the most part are in a slightly different spot. So for a Mac, you're going to want to go to the main hard drive, and then library, application supports, just like before. And then this time, rather than it being under SketchUp 5, which I think I still have the old SketchUp 5 folder down there, you're going to go to Google SketchUp 6, then SketchUp, and then plug-ins. And then you're talking about take the file that you download, and it's going to have a .rb extension, and you're going to drop it in that folder. Now that plug-in in particular, the Soap Skin Bubble one, lives in the tools menu, and the instructions for that are on their site, so when you go to their site, you'll see that. But that one actually, you can see the Soap Skin Bubble folder, and the Soap Skin Bubble tools file, which references all the stuff in that folder. Those all go into the tools folder in 6. And when you're on a Windows machine, luckily I can bring that up even though I'm on my Mac, again, consider this as like the C drive. So you go to the main hard drive, the C drive, and from there you're going to want to go to program files, and then Google SketchUp 6, and then plug-ins. So there's your plug-ins folder. And again, you just drop those .rb files right into the plug-ins folder, and also the Soap Skin Bubble would live in the tools folder on a PC as well. Just the same way. Now one other thing too, just worth pointing out, if you guys don't like messing with the root directory, it is possible on a Mac, rather than going to the main hard drive, then library application support, you can go to the user names, if you have multiple users, or if you're the only user who needs access to those Ruby scripts, you can go to the user file, then library application support, and then Google SketchUp 6, SketchUp, and I think you can also put your plug-ins folder, like you can just copy the whole plug-ins folder into the user directory, and SketchUp will know to reference that stuff too. So I've seen a couple people do it that way, so I just kind of wanted to point that out. Alright, well, that's pretty cool. We're going to make sure to answer any more questions that you guys send our way in future episodes. Either through the forums, or you can email us at info at gotoschool.com. Okay, thanks a lot for joining us this week, and we'll catch you next time. See you guys.