Architectural_Design_with_SketchUp

Chapter 6 Creating Geometry Using Ruby Scripting
Figure 6.25: Modified panels and the two attractor boxes
Solar-Responsive Design
This script does not use attractors per se. It is, however, an example of how you could use a
direction (expressed as a vector) to drive your design. To make our design more responsive
to lighting, we’ll use the “south” direction in our model to modify the shape of components
that we place on a curved surface.
To accomplish this, we’ll reuse the code from the Placing Components on Faces script
from earlier. All we need to do this time is modify the section that transforms the copied
ComponentInstance.
You can try this if you have various faces in your selection as well as one component. The
example shown in Figure 6.26, uses a curved surface that was subdivided into many faces
and the same circle component as was used with the earlier code. Once you have these, select
them, copy the following code into the Ruby Code Editor, and click on Run.
# Maps a component onto the center of all selected faces and
# scales based on south orientation
271