That’s right! Regular Polygon is moving to a real, honest to goodness, website. It has been clear for some time that the blog was really inadequate. As plugins evolve, and new updates are released, it becomes more and more difficult to keep the content organized – especially if it is spread over four or five posts. At last, the plugins have all found a new home. Here is the link:
Please update your bookmarks.
Thanks
There is a new toolbar in version 1.4 to facilitate the workflow. Now, the main features are just a click away. All the details are at the new website:
Version 1.3 takes another step towards simplifying the process for creating an animation. Actually, it eliminates an entire step. You no longer need to specify which instances are animated. This use to be done by naming the instance, or selecting it and adding it to the animation. The script will now automatically distinguish which instances are active and which are static. You don’t have to do anything.
The basic workflow can be summarized in five simple steps:
For more information, video tutorials, downloads, etc., please visit the new website at:
This short-lived update simplified the workflow by allowing you to add multiple instances to the animation, in one step, from the context menu. That was less tedious than having to assign each of them a unique name, which was how animated objects were indicated in previous versions.
For more information about the current version of the plugin, please visit the new website at:
This update mainly contained improvements to the code. Particularly the code for creating the tweens, which was completely rewritten from top to bottom. It is much more efficient, and generates the tween scenes in roughly half the time it took for version 1.0.
Turns out that the object positions are described relative to the model, rather than in local coordinates, when a component is open for editing. This caused the animation to go completely awry if the position data was recorded while in edit mode. Now the script warns the user in this situation.
Visit the new Keyframe Animation website at:
This plug-in provides simple, but powerful, object animation in SketchUp. It will animate the movement of objects between scenes. All you have to do is assign the position of the objects on each scene. So, the scenes act like key frames.
You can add movement to doors, windows, cars, wheels, gears… you name it. Create an animation to show how parts are assembled in a construction process. You can even create complex animations, where objects move in relation to other moving objects. Best of all, you can export your animation to a movie, directly from SketchUp.
The plug-in has moved to new website. So has the documentation, all the video demos, and the tutorials. Please follow the link below:
This update uses the exact equations for the curve to compute the coordinates of each point. That makes it more accurate than version 1.0 by an amount epsilon, where epsilon is arbitrarily small, but greater than zero ;-)
This plug-in is available at the new website with all the other plug-ins by Regular Polygon. Here is the link.
This plugin draws a spherical helix, also called a loxodrome. It is a spiral curve on the surface of a sphere, which crosses all meridians of longitude at the same angle.
Conceptually, this is the path a ship would follow if it traveled around the earth without changing direction. In other words, if the ship proceeded along a course with constant bearing relative to true north, then it would trace out a spherical helix (luxodrome) as it circled the globe.
To download the plug-in, please visit the new website at:
This plugin draws a spherical spiral. Specifically, it is an Archimedean spherical spiral because like the 2D Archimedean spiral, the turns are all the same distance apart. A picture should make this more clear.
You can download the Spherical Spiral plugin at the new website:
The Sierpinski Tetrahedron is a 3D fractal. It is constructed by an iterative process, where each level is built up from subcomponents of the previous level.
In the first iteration, you start with a simple tetrahedron, scale it down to one half the size, make four copies, and arrange them in the tetrahedron-like shape pictured below.
The second iteration is the same procedure, only you apply it to the first level tetrahedron. The result is the second level tetrahedron.
At each level, the inside faces are painted a different color. The sequence is red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and magenta. I think this helps to reveal the structure.
Here is how the fifth level tetrahedron looks.
This plugin will construct the Sierpinski Tetrahedron up to the seventh level. At that point, I ran out of contrasting colors for the inside faces. And it takes over two minutes to generate all the geometry, so it seemed like a good place to quit.
To run the script, select Sierpinski Tetrahedron from the Draw menu. This brings up a dialog box. Enter the parameter values. Click OK, and place the component in the model.
The outside color was left undefined, and shows up as white by default. You can easily change it by clicking anywhere on the component with the paint bucket.
The colors of the inside faces can also be changed with the paint bucket. Just open the component (double-click with the select tool) first. All the inside faces for a particular level are grouped together as a subcomponent. So, if you click on one inside face with the paint bucket, all the faces in that subcomponent will be painted.
Download the Sierpinski Tetrahedron version 1.0 here: rp_sierpinski_tetrahedron.rb.
To install, move the file rp_sierpinski_tetrahedron.rb to your SketchUp Plugins folder. Restart SketchUp.
