[Plugin] Component Comparison (0.2.0a) — 15 August 2010

[thomthom]

The tolerance is more of a debug thing at the moment. During my testing I had some cases where SU's own tolerance of 1/1000" was too strict.

These leaves: are you sure they really are all geometrical identical? The plugin does not take into account scaling, for instance, a square of 20x30 and one of 20x40 will not be made into one component where one is scaled.

[wyatt]

Then no, they are not identical. The length and width of each component varies. The ratio of l to w is the same (hence the square). I guess I thought the tolerance setting could be used to adjust how the similar components were replaced. I can use the component browser and replace components manually to simplify the model, but it would be great if there were a way to automate that process.

[Edit] Do your Selection Toys select by component area? That would definitely help if the tolerance method isn't possible.

[Chris Fullmer]

I tihnk what you are looking for is a good idea Wyatt, but its definitely different than what the original scope of this plugin was. This one is supposed to find virtually identical components and make them all use the same definition.

But a replacer that just looked for fairly similar components could be interesting too. Maybe it fits within the scope of this plugin even. I can see where it does have some usefulness in the scenario you outlined.

[wyatt]

I don't know if it fits Thom's original idea for this plugin or not; I'll leave that for him to decide. But what I would like to have is a tool that would, based on a selection set, calculate the range of area values, ask me how many intervals I'd like to set, and then replace all the components in a given range with the resized component. So if I had leaves that ranged from 30 to 80 square inches, I could set 5 intervals and it would resize the components based on that 10 square inch interval, so a component with an area of 42, would get "rounded down" to 40. There might be other ways to do the same thing; this is just what I was hoping I could get CC to do for me. Even if I could select components by those area intervals, it would be a huge help.

[thomthom]

Making tree leaves into components appear to be a often requested feature, so maybe a plugin designed specifically for this. One that finds all rectangle faces in the selection and converts them into one component with scaled instances.
That could work. For Component Comparison it'd not be so easy as it's already doing some heavy work comparing complex objects, but if one limits the scope to simple primitive...

[wyatt]

Thom, that sounds like it would work great, and cut several steps from my current workflow.

[guaucorreo]

excuse me,
this plugin can´t compare similar objects with DIFERENT scale ¿is there a plugin that make that?
thanks

[halroach]

Hi Thomthom,

This plugin is great!
Very helpful when importing lame models from Autocad and 3DSMax.

Just a little note.
As I was searching for this thread to see if any changes have been made, specifically wondering if detecting scaled objects will be possible (like the post above this one) - I was having a hard time finding this thread in the forums. Partly because the search engine here isn't great, but also because the name of the thread and the name of the plugin files and commands are different. In sketchup it's "replace similar objects" and here it's called Component Comparison...

[thomthom]

I've had no time at all to work on this. There's much more that needs doing before even attempting to detect scaled components.

[thirty6]

Thanks thomthom really cool time saver.

How did you get on with rendering in 3ds max?

Matt