I wonder if there is an extension that does something that those of us in building design have to do every day?
When producing 2D plans (something that will be with us for a long time yet), we need to show symbolic doors and door swings. There are many styles, but in essence it consists of a frame, a door, and a notional swing. It’s easy enough to make a component and not too hard to make a Dynamic Component, but I am imagining something that goes a little further. The basic parameters required are these:
• Origin point
• Destination point
• Orientation
As example, taking an opening in a wall that appears horizontal on screen, you click bottom left to establish the origin point. A ghost image of a default component appears. Let’s say that is hinged left with door/swing to top of opening on screen. It rotates according to where you place your second point. Let’s say bottom right. That establishes size. If it is what you want at this point, you hit Enter to finish. Alternatively, you click to the right of the component and the door gets hinged right. Enter to finish. If you wanted the door to open “downwards”, you would simply choose top right and top left as your first two clicks. This would enable you to draw any one of the four possible arrangements (in/out; left/right) for any width of opening with three clicks.
Here is a DC I made that does some of what I am after. It allows for any width of opening but then you have to flip it to do the rest. Internal door (DC).skp (81.2 KB)
And here is a visual representation of what I describe above:
I have some of the same ideas as you for the door-window tool.
Currently, this is how I do it: using Dynamic Component for sizing (scale tool) with Curic Mirror and Align.
This should be like tools we have in 2d CAD. You insert a door, and just moving the cursor it flips back and forth or to the other side of the wall. It would automatically cut the wall. It could have a preset default distance from the corner and can also be aligned with other elements by center. It would naturally be set at floor level. Curic’s approach looks good.
Good ideas. Nonetheless I personally haven’t looked at all the extensions already available.
I add the door swing as a dynamic component to my door components, slightly above floor level to avoid visibility problems in LayOut. I use a separate tag for all these and other annotation objects intended to be visible only on plan views.
Just playing with Simon’s 2d door. It gets me halfway to what i need but not seeming to figure out how to get it to do all of what i need. Anybody happen to have any easy solution/ideas. I just need/want a 2d symbol for site surveys. This is the best I have used so far. It need to be 2d only.
Simon’s takes its width measurement from the outside of the frame. It would work better for me for the measurement to be tied (scale) to the door width/opening. For example i’ll draw a wall and leave a 32" gap and i want to put a door in it and sclale to fit.
I’d love to get the measurments to input as inches not mm. Seems like that should be simple but i can’t seem to get it to work right.
Lastly, i’d like to be able to make a second door version that was 1.75" thich for doors 36" wide and greater. Thanks.
I am in UK and therefore work in metric. But you can easily edit the parts of the drawing to suit dimensions in imperial. In your situation, I would amend the drawing to suit your needs and then keep it as a template for use in future.
Thanks. Was not working out to make the adjustments in my efforts but I will keep trying. I think the bigger issue is getting the door to scale from the oppeing or door width rather than the outside of the frame.
Scaling is easy providing you constrain the component whilst you do it. Of course, everything within the geometry will scale by the same amount as it is not parametric. That is generally fine if you are only scaling by a small amount and you are not looking for absolute accuracy.
Thanks. I was just not scrolling down far enough in the parameters and had left one field in mm. I can get it to dimmension correctly but still not albe to figure out how to scale to the door opeing width rather than to the frame exterior.
Turns out i didnt look carefully, I need it to scale parametricaly - mistakenly thought that it did. I can’t have the door get thicker as the opeing gets wider. As is, I have door component’s for every 2" incriment in my component folder now. Thanks for spending the time helping me.
Thanks. I have seen that and it is more or less what i have done in the past. I’m looking for a 2d only solution that lets me scale doors without changing the door thickenss. So i’d have a door componant that could scale for doors from 18" to 34" and stay 1.375" thick and one for doors 36" and up that would stay 1.75" thick. For windows I can just use Fredo Scale box streching but that doesn’t work for doors with the swing indicator line. That make sense?
This is partly why even till this year, I normally measure on site and draw 2D in PowerCADD, and then turn it into 3D in SketchUp back at the office. I tried an experiment last fall drawing on site with SU for iPad, but it doesn’t do Dynamic Components (or Match Photo for that matter).
FlexTools comes with a bunch parametric doors and windows, and you can resize them with the scale tool without distorting the inner parts. Out of the box, they’re all metric, but you can switch to imperial and change them.
Yep. That sounds like my experience save that i am doing the first half of site plans while on site. Its all for film work. I do a lot of 3d that ends up as previs and 3d that gets worked into 2d build plans but i also need to just draw up location plans that are just 2d. That’s what i am trying to sort out. I don’t want to have 3d elements mixed in. I currently have door symbols in a component folder in loads of sizes. It is not an elegant solution but it works. Just got SketchUp loaded on my ipad. I think without access to components it is not gonna be much help for this. Writing notes on a seperate layer will be helpful when showing others what i am working on but not so much for initial drawing creation. I am sure that there is a way to create what i need so, I will give a whirl at some point. Seems i can make a dynamic components. Lock some parameters (like door thickness) and have other parameters adjustable via typing them it but I just want to plop in a door and scale it without the door thickness changing.
Hello! Still new and learning SketchUp here. How did you create the toggle between plane and 3d like shown in your video?? Is there a video somewhere on sketch up campus or YouTube that can show me how?
