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Eneroth Solid Tools

Eneroth Solid tools are designed to be easy to use solid operations that better fit into SketchUp than SketchUp's native solid tools.

Differences from native Solid Tools

The key difference is that these operations modify existing group/components (from now on called containers) in place, rather than outputting the result to a brand new group. Retaining the original object allows for BIM attributes, axes placement, material inheritance, layer, references in other extensions and other properties/aspects to be retained.

This also mean all other instances of the same component are modified as once. If the user wants to modify only one instance, it is up to the user to explicitly make that instance unique first. It is not up to the operations to implicitly make definitions unique without the users knowledge or consent.

These operations also make the material inheritance model remain intact. If the user has made the decision to keep the default (aka nil) material on all faces in a container and instead have painted the container as a whole from the outside, this choice is respected (this is by the way the preferred way to apply materials in SketchUp as it allows for fast repainting of the object).

Lastly these operators ignore nested containers, whereas the native operators refuse to regard any container with nested containers as a solid.

Implementation stuff

Preserving the existing object is made possible by regarding all operations as asymmetrical (or non communicative). Even the union operation, which geometrically is symmetrical, is regarded asymmetrical, with one target container being modifier, and one modifier container defining how to perform the modifications.

Use in Other Extensions

These operations were originally created for use in other extensions (Eneroth Townhouse System to be precise) and not be a standalone extension. In time the solid operations should be split off into its own library (see #2). For now the solid_operations.rb file have to be ripped out of this extension if it is to be used elsewhere.

Project history

This project was started back in 2014 when I (Eneroth3) was still quite new to Ruby and programming in general. I worked hard over a few days to clean up, refactor and style the code to the state where it could be published.

Large changes in March 2018.