Architectural_Design_with_SketchUp

Chapter 6 Creating Geometry Using Ruby Scripting
Once you hit Return, you should see a triangle appear in SketchUp’s modeling area (at
the origin, to be exact). It should look like Figure 6.4.
You can even access some of SketchUp’s user interface components. Just for fun, let’s
open a file selection dialog. Enter this code:
UI.openpanel ‘Select any file please’
As you can see, this one-liner opens a
dialog, lets you select any file, and returns
its location on your computer (the complete
path) in the results part of the Ruby
Console. Don’t worry—nothing will happen
to the file. All you did was ask yourself
for a filename.
As you can see in these examples, the
Ruby Console is already very powerful.
One thing that it can’t do, though, is execute
multiline scripts. For this, we need to
enhance SketchUp with a plugin.
Installing the Ruby Code
Editor Plugin
Throughout the rest of this chapter, we
use the free Ruby Code Editor plugin to Figure 6.4: Adding a triangle in SketchUp using Ruby code
edit and run Ruby code within SketchUp.
While this plugin is a convenient way to accomplish the task, there are also other methods
and plugins that work well—they will be described later.
Here’s what you need to do:
1. Go to my website and download the installer file for the plugin. Download the ZIP or
RBZ-version of the installer file (see Chapter 4 regarding how to install RBZ files). www.
alexschreyer.net/projects/sketchup-ruby-code-editor.
2. If you downloaded the ZIP-file, open the file using your favorite ZIP compression software.
Often, your operating system simply opens the file if you double-click it. If that doesn’t
work, use software such as 7-Zip (download from www.7-zip.org) to unzip it.
3. Paste the contents of the file into SketchUp’s Plugins folder on your hard disk. You can find
that folder in the following locations. Important: Retain the file and folder organization
as it was included in your ZIP file. Windows: C:\Program Files\Google\Google SketchUp
\Plugins\ Mac: /Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp /
SketchUp/Plugins/.
4. Restart SketchUp. You should see the following menu item in the Window
menu (next to the Ruby Console menu item you used earlier). Click on it to
start up the code editor.
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