The first is Joint Push Pull, which extrudes along normals, giving a smooth, contiguous, offset face. It actually offers three different methods for pushing or pulling a surface. This is where the Joint Push Pull plug-in from SketchUp user Fredo6 comes into its own. It is possible to achieve the same result by building the surface using Offset and Line, but it’s a time-consuming process that’s prone to error. In this case, SketchUp’s own tool will resolutely refuse to work. Sooner or later, though, you’ll come across a situation where you want to perform a Push/Pull operation on a curved surface. SketchUp is founded on its Push/Pull tool, which enables you to easily extrude planes into volumes. Since Ruby is a scripting language, they will run equally capably on the Mac OS X or Windows versions of SketchUp (and on both SketchUp and SketchUp Pro). Some of these plug-ins automate tasks that would take a fair bit of planning and desk time, while others add capabilities that would simply not be achievable using the base toolbox.
