been playing with some ruby scripts and found a great one called 'fredoscale'.

you can check it out here:
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=17948

made it work (slowly and after crashing my machine several times) on this model i've been working on for a builder / designer:






here's a video i shot of the plug in doing its work on a simple form:

This is a fantastic script. I've been trying to get Fredo to build us a custom timber stretching tool, but he's been very busy with other stuff. You can use his stretch tool to properly stretch timbers, or even spread bents apart without incorrectly distorting the timbers anbd joints. You have to group, stretch, explode to get it to work right, but it's pretty cool! CB.

yes, very cool.

i've been working with the bend portion of it as i do plenty of curved work... i'm trying to work out the geometry of the bend - it appears that a 'bend' input angle of X degrees actually moves the end point of the selection 1/2 of that distance (so 1/2 of X) - so now i need to work out what ratio there is from 'bend' angle to arc length / etc... and decide if i want to venture into how it might affect overall length of a component - as my guess is that the bent length does not change...

all this so i have more control over it. i eyeballed the house bend by dragging the tool until it looked close enough to the arc i had drawn on the interior radius...