Architectural_Design_with_SketchUp

Architectural Design with SketchUp
We can now take this geometry as the basis for further modeling. In this case, I used
SketchUp’s standard Push/Pull tool to extrude the patterned panel (there is no need to do
that using code!). When we placed the circles on top of the square face, their faces were
automatically separated from the underlying face. This allowed me to use a single push/pull
to finish the panel. A rendering could then look like Figure 6.14.
Figure 6.14: Rendered panels
You can get creative with this little bit of code if you replace some of the sin functions
with cos or any other mathematical formula. You can also experiment with some of the factors
that end up determining circle diameter (the last parameter in the add_circle method)
or the expression between the brackets in the sine function.
TIP
One thing that may stump you when doing calculations in Ruby is Ruby’s reluctance to
give a floating point value after dividing two integers. This is the reason you see to_f in a
few places in the code. This little snippet converts any number to a “float,” a real number.
Alternatively, you could initialize the variables with an extra digit, as in width = 36.0.
Plotting Data from Text Files
When you create geometry, parameters might need to come from a source outside of
SketchUp. This would be the case if you had an Excel spreadsheet with x,y,z coordinates
(as would be available from a LIDAR laser scan or from a land surveyor). You might also have
other software (structural or other building analysis software) export parameters that you
could use for geometry creation. In any case, let’s assume for this example that you had point
coordinates stored in a text file in the following format:
81.82821,16.42147,205.31
83.07821,16.33147,204.91
83.57821,10.31147,204.87
82.20821,10.43147,204.50
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