what plugins do you use?


rodger.

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Cut List by Steve R - very good

Layer Manager by D.Bur - indispensable, a must have if you make use of layers (I do coming from an Autocad background).

WudWorx - Dovetailing, Mortise and Tenon, and more. This is something I paid for (inexpensive). It is really good and a fantastic timesaver. I mean who really wants to draw dovetails manually? This is a point and click solution.

 

There are many, many more that I have tried out but the 3 above are what I use all the time.

 

Also another one that isn't a plugin as such but is in the forum Sketchup library is akb-WoodSpecies to give approximate rendering of the various timbers you may use on a project.

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RoundCorner is a simple plugin to allow you to round or facet selected edges in a model. Of course you can do the same thing by constructing rounded edges using the "Follow Me" tool or the "Push/Pull" tool but this plugin just makes it so much easier. Specifically if you have a model with more complex geometry.

 

Basically click of a button to do this:

20b25v6.png

 

or this:

2r5uq79.png

 

The Weld plugin is sort of the opposite of SketchUp's "Explode Curve" function. If you have a set of connected lines which you'd like for SketchUp to view as a single curve, you just select all of the lines and weld them together. There are two cases specifically where this is useful.

 

Firstly, if you use the Push/Pull tool on a face, SketchUp will create hard lines on the newly created faces everywhere two lines on the edge of the face being extruded meet. This makes sense and when you extrude a square for instance you want the corners to form hard edges as they are extruded. Sometimes however, you don't. Here is a face that I've constructed, a 5 point star with rounded outer and inner corners. It consists of 10 straight lines for the arms connected by 10 curves. This isn't obvious by just looking at the face but as soon as you extrude it, it becomes very obvious.

29vxsva.png

 

When I first select all the edges of the star and weld them together, this is what it looks like when I extrude it.

2z5lsaw.png

 

The second use of the Weld plugin is when I use the "Follow Me" tool to follow a shape along a path. If the path consists of discrete sections, the resulting geometry will have hard lines on the intersections of all lines. Here I have a path in the shape of a helix which I've created from a whole bunch of short lines. When I follow a circle along the path, this is what I get:

4sh91j.png

 

But if I first weld all of the sections of the helix together, I can create a nice spring withou all of those hard lines between all the segments.

11hrkfp.png

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