Architectural_Design_with_SketchUp

Chapter 6 Creating Geometry Using Ruby Scripting
The attractor can be any object. For convenience, I like using either component instances
(the default figure in SketchUp’s template—lately, “Susan”—for example) or groups or construction
points, but it is up to you to decide what works best in your case. Just modify the
code examples slightly to make them work if you deviate from the examples.
Coloring Faces by Proximity
This code takes several faces and one or more component instances and then colors the faces
according to their proximity to the centers of the component instances (the “attractors”). A
face that is close to an attractor gets a blue color, one that is far away turns yellow, and any
faces in between receive colors from a graduated spectrum.
This example uses a facade made up of several 4’ × 8’ glass panels. These are simply
faces (rectangles) copied edge to edge. We leave them all ungrouped so that the code can
identify them as faces. In addition, we place one to three copies of the default SketchUp
“person” in various locations and with differing distances to the facade (the closest is the
one on the left side). Before running the code, select all of the faces and the people components.
Figure 6.22 shows the raw setup with the facade panels and only one attractor. It
also illustrates the result of running the code on this setup.
Figure 6.22: Single-attractor-based coloring of facade panels
Paste this code into the Ruby Code Editor, select the necessary objects in your SketchUp
model, and then click on Run:
# Color faces by proximity to component attractors
sel = Sketchup.active_model.selection
# Array with attractor center points
attractors = []
# Adjust this value to play with the scaling
max_val = 500
# Get all ComponentInstances as attractor points
sel.each { |e|
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