Subtitles of the Movie

So now we're going to go ahead and take a look at some of the third-party Rubies that I got from places like Smustard and Ruby Depot and I have those in this folder here, which again is not really all that important but I wanted to point out to you some of the ones that are a little bit more unusual and things that you wouldn't necessarily even think that SketchUp could do. One of my favorite is Sketchy Free-Form Distort which is Sketchy FFD.RB and this one doesn't use any support files. It just goes in by itself. It's a very, very useful Ruby and I'm going to show you how this works. Now, it's helpful for this particular Ruby if your geometry has already been broken down into segmented pieces because if you try to distort with the Freeform tools, large, solid blocks of geometry, you're going to get some undesirable things. If you remember our lesson here where we had this subdivided grate, we're going to go ahead and actually do some fun stuff to this with the Sketchy Free-Form Distort. What we're going to do is we're just going to go ahead and select that particular piece of geometry and I'm going to go ahead and choose a three by three Freeform distort and you can choose to have how many ever points that you want here but you'll see what I mean in just a second. So I'm going to go ahead and start with three by three and immediately what we see are these little black shapes and you may or may not even understand what's going on here so what I'm going to enter into this particular group right here with these little Freeform distort things and now you can see that everything else is grayed out but those Freeform distort things and how I did that was I double clicked on them and now I'm just going to go ahead and select them and move them just I would any other geometry in SketchUp. So if I just go ahead and click and drag and select and I'm just going to go ahead and pull them up and you'll get a pretty good idea what this does right away. So I'm just going to pull them up and click and in a second, there we go. That is what the Free-Form Distort does in a nutshell. It effectively pulls your geometry in whichever direction you want. If you don't like that distortion, just undo it. There we go. Undo move again, there we go. Now we're back. Let's say I wanted to try a different distort. So I'm going to try something a little bit different. I'm going to try just grabbing these middle ones here. And now I'm going to go ahead and just drag those guys up and there we go. Now I only have the bow in the middle because those are the points that I pulled on. So you can see here that you have quite a lot of control. These can all be manipulated independently of each other. I'm going to go ahead and just pull this back corner here and I go the wrong one this time so let me just go ahead. There we go. Now I'm back where I need to be and for this one I'll just go ahead and pull these back on the red axis like so, let it update and you can see here that you can actually take and bend your geometry quite nicely, utilizing this Sketchy Free-Form Distort Plug-In. It's a really, really fantastic plug-in. I highly recommend that you try it. It's free, it's really fun to use and it does some things that you just can't do any other way in SketchUp. The next one that I want to look at is our Sketchy Bevel. Now, this one couldn't be simpler but at the same time it can save you a lot of time. It doesn't do anything that you couldn't already do in SketchUp on your own, but it just does it in such a way that it just makes your life a lot easier. And, you know, I'll go ahead and start with one of my famous boxes that you've seen me do a million times. I'm going to go ahead and just select all the geometry and then I'm going to context click and say Bevel. It's going to ask me how big do I want my bevels to be and one inch sounds fine. It's going to ask me if I want to cap the holes. I'll just leave that going and hit OK and boom; now it's all beveled. I don't have to manually go through all that trouble. It's already done for me. That's the Bevel Tool. Well, like I said, it's not something that you couldn't do yourself but at the same time it sure does save you an awful lot of headache. So you can see here that these free third-party Ruby Plug-Ins that you get from places like Smustard and from Ruby Depot can really, really be helpful. Probably one of my favorites though is this Path Copy Ruby. This one actually comes with a folder as well as two Ruby Scripts. I'm going to go ahead and grab all three, drag them over and then I'm simply going to go ahead and start SketchUp and I've actually prepared a file for this. It's a real simple file. It's just got Sang standing at the origin. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and take the Free-From Pen Tool and I'm just going to go ahead and draw out a path; something like that and I just want to make sure that that's actually, oops, look at that. It's not at all on the ground plane. Well, that isn't going to work. Let's go ahead and try that again. Let's try, let's see if that's on the ground plane. Yeah, that's what I was looking for. OK, so we just have a path. It could be any path. It doesn't really much matter. I just think this is really nice and dramatic when you see this. So now I'm going to go to Plug-Ins, Copy Along Path. Now, I can copy to path nodes or I can copy to spacing. I find copy to spacing to be a lot more useful. So now it's going to say Distance Between and I'm going to go ahead and say five feet, hit Enter and then I'm simply going to click on the component that I want to copy and now you can see that Sang has been copied at every five feet along this path; a really amazing, simple to use and very, very useful plug-in, like so many that you can find for free online. It's just an amazing, amazing thing for SketchUp user to have all this resources at their fingertips. I highly recommend that you try as many of these as you can and experiment and see what works for you and what doesn't.