Upon installation (via SketchUcation or the Extension Warehouse), you will see a toolbar with several icons. Here is what each does and when to use it.
Start with a simple cube. Apply Radial Bend to it. Then apply Twist. Once you see how stable the geometry stays, you’ll never look at the native scale tool the same way again.
FredoScale is a transformative extension for SketchUp that expands the native Scale tool's capabilities by adding interactive geometric transformations. It allows you to orient a selection box around objects and apply complex deformations like stretching, twisting, and bending that are impossible with standard SketchUp tools. Core Capabilities
Unlike the native tool which is locked to model axes, FredoScale lets you define a custom orientation for your scaling box. fredoscale plugin sketchup
Box Stretching: Stretch objects without distorting specific parts, like keeping furniture material thickness consistent while resizing.
Twisting & Bending: Rotate or curve objects along a specific path or angle, useful for creating spiral staircases or curved architecture.
Tapering & Shearing: Create complex shapes like turning a sphere into an egg or adding a planar slant to an object. Shear slants an object
Flattening: Quickly make edges coplanar (on the same level) to fix imported CAD geometry and allow SketchUp to form faces. Getting Started The ULTIMATE GUIDE to FredoScale for SketchUp!
Shear slants an object. Imagine taking a deck of cards and pushing the top card sideways.
Enter Fredo Leroy, known in the SketchUp community simply as Fredo6. He wasn't an employee of SketchUp; he was a civil engineer and a virtuoso of Ruby scripting. He looked at the SketchUp interface and saw not limitations, but opportunities for surgery. fredoscale plugin sketchup
He didn't want to just add a button; he wanted to rewrite the laws of physics within the digital sandbox. Thus, FredoScale was born.
FredoScale is not free (usually around $15-20 USD via the SketchUcation store), but it is the best money you will spend after your initial SketchUp Pro license.
Installation Note: FredoScale requires two other libraries to work: LibFredo6 (the framework) and TT_Lib (Trimble Library). Don't skip these! The plugin will prompt you to install them automatically.
