This idea of using technologies that require no additional software fits pretty well with SketchUp’s development philosophy, and my research this summer hints at the potential of a SketchUp configurator for the web. Everything ends up in the same place, albeit in pieces, and everything works just the same after being reassembled. All the geometry gets packed and sent in one file, while all the attribute data gets sent in another.

In a way, the extension acts like a moving truck. The browser is then able to reunite the geometry from the exported file to its JavaScript counterpart, so the component can be parametrically manipulated. To close this gap, I used SketchUp’s Ruby API to create an extension that exports the component along with its dynamic properties wrapped up in a separate JavaScipt object. But dynamic components are more than just geometry they contain attributes like variable values and formulas.

You see, what our viewer prototype reads and displays is the geometry contained within a SketchUp file. I also had to investigate how to teach a web browser what a dynamic component is in the first place. Proving that a web application could configure a SketchUp model was only one part of my research.

This allowed me to properly rewrite the dynamic component functionality in JavaScript so that the behavior in a web browser would be consistent for users. Reading through the source code didn’t hurt, either. This involved hours of playing inside SketchUp on my own and bugging numerous engineers for help. To pull this off, I thoroughly investigated how dynamic components work. I spent a great deal of time making sure that when an input parameter changed, the browser displayed component transformed just as it would inside SketchUp. It’s still a prototype, but this viewer offered me a basic way to display a dynamic component online, and then redraw it as parameters changed. Last year, we unveiled the SketchUp Showcase which featured the prototype of a web-based model viewer that lets you to rotate and view models in a browser without having to install any additional software. Another way of looking at it: can we teach a web browser to customize a dynamic component? My summer research project was to investigate the feasibility of configuring those parameters from within a browser, before downloading the component to your computer. To use a dynamic component today, you’d download one from the 3D Warehouse (or create it from scratch) and open it in SketchUp before you can change its parametric options. One of SketchUp’s most powerful feature sets are dynamic components, groups of geometry that have advanced functionality.

Sketchup on the web