Architectural_Design_with_SketchUp

Architectural Design with SketchUp
A final note before you get going with plugins in SketchUp: Plugin development and especially
maintenance are quite involved tasks. Although many plugins have been provided for
free to the community, consider donating to the authors if they ask for it and you find their
plugins useful. If you get inspired by what is possible in SketchUp and take to Ruby scripting
yourself (especially after reading Chapter 6 in this book), then an alternative idea to “pay
back” to the community might be to share your own code as plugins.
Plugins for General Modeling
BezierSpline
By Fredo6—Free [5, 6]
If you need a smooth curve (a spline) for a walkway or a kidneyshaped
table, for example, use this plugin to create curves that
are determined by control points. You can edit created curves
by moving control points and applying various parameters, such
as the precision of a curve.
As always in SketchUp, once a curve closes, a face is created.
And while edges appear as curves, they do consist of
connected polyline segments just like any other curved shape
in SketchUp.
BoolTools
By Whaat—$10 [4]
If you don’t have the Pro version of SketchUp and are therefore
lacking the Solid Tools, then this plugin offers a cost-efficient
way to use Boolean operations such as subtract, add, or difference
on components.
Components onto Faces
By C. Fullmer—Free [5, 6]
This plugin copies components orthogonally onto
all selected faces. The result is similar to what can
be seen in the “Placing Components on Faces”
example in Chapter 6.
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Curviloft
By Fredo6—Free [5, 6]
This plugin makes it easy to fit a surface (consisting
of quadrilateral or triangular faces) between
a set of controlling lines or curves. You can create
either a lofted surface, a swept surface, or a
surface bordered by edge curves.