Architectural_Design_with_SketchUp

Architectural Design with SketchUp
Let’s try this out: Enter puts “Hello World!” into the text field and hit the Return key.
The result shown here should appear in the dialog.
Because the puts command simply prints something to the result part of the dialog, all
you get as a result is the “Hello World!” string.
You can even get a little more “programmy” by assigning variables. First, enter a = “Hello
World!”, hit the Return key, and then enter puts a. You will find that you get the same result.
In this case, however, we assigned a text string to a variable first.
Let’s try something a bit more useful—let’s do some calculations. As it turns out, you can
essentially use this dialog as a built-in calculator. Enter 2*16, and you should get a result of
32. You can use any of the common mathematical symbols here such as +, —, /, *, and **
for power (as in 2**4 equals 16) as well as parentheses to structure calculations.
To make things more interesting, let’s try a square root. Enter sqrt(10) and you should
see 3.16227766016838 as the result. Nice, isn’t it?
As you might have guessed, you can use any of the usual mathematical operators and
functions here. This is the complete list of all built-in math functions: acos, erfc, asin, atan,
cosh, sinh, tanh, acosh, asinh, atanh, exp, log, log10, sqrt, atan2, frexp, cos, ldexp, sin,
hypot, tan, erf.
TIP
When using any trigonometric functions such as sin for the Sine of an angle, keep in mind
that the argument must be in radians. You must add .degrees (including the dot) to the
angle to get the correct answer. Example: sin(45.degrees) results in 0.707.
Furthermore, although these functions should work without a problem, their complete
“name” is, for example, Math.sin, where the class name “Math” (in which these functions
are defined) is prepended (with a dot as shown). Use this syntax instead if you run
into any problems.
While this is all great, the preceding examples use only the scripting language Ruby itself.
Let’s try an example where we actually get SketchUp to do something. Enter the following
line of code into the Ruby Console:
Sketchup.active_model.entities.add_face [0,0,0],[0,10,0],[0,10,10]
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