I find it takes a lot of effort to align a leg and bracket at odd angles. This animated gif shows my technique, but I’m hoping someone could help me improve (there must be a simpler way). I’ve also included the Sketchup file used to make the animated gif. I just want to do this with native tools and here’s the simplest way I’ve come up with:
define the leg as a component
right click>change axis so the right surface will become flush
activate “glue to”
place the component with face flush
At this point there are 2 problems:
a) I’d like to line up the top holes at this point, but the ‘component place’ step won’t let me
b) then after that I can’t use the rotate tool to line up the bottom holes
so to get around these 2 problems I do this:
use X-ray to line up the top holes
change the universal axis as needed and then rotate to align the bottom holes
Of course your suggestion does make sense. But I didn’t intend to ask this question only for the example I provided. Perhaps I didn’t choose the best example, it’s only the latest case in which this question has come up for me.
The problem especially arises when there is a small part that is placed in multiple locations in the model. For example, bolts that will go in all sorts of different angles. And I thought that was the whole point of dragging things out from the components window. I certainly wouldn’t want to make a detailed component like that over and over again in each place.
So I thank you for your suggestion, but I would appreciate it if somebody would address my specific question
I would group the object then inside the object change the axis to the angle that fits then you can easily move the object using regular directions.
I think you can also bind different axis to different scenes and then not use groups so maybe a scene for that axis with all the other toggles unchecked (such as the camera).
I’ve read your comment carefully, but I can’t quite understand it. I did try changing the axis within the component, and that did help me for that specific leg. But then I found out that it messed up the angles of the other components in the model. But maybe this is not what you’re talking about.
Did you try applying your idea on the example.SKP file I provided?
If you change the axis IN the group, it will not change the main axis outside the group. If it’s a component then of course all of the same component will reflect that changed access. You can instead group on top of that component to encapsulate it twice and change the axis in the group portion leaving the component axis as it originally was.
It might just be easier to set the axis to a scene though. Have 1 scene the main axis and a 2nd be this new axis setting the scene properties to only record the axis setting. This would you could just click back and forth.
I did the scene option of setting the axis (first is original and 2nd scene aligns with the angle) and I put the 2nd arm into the alignment of the 2nd axis by rotating (twice technically) it then moved it to the other piece by the button point to the correct button point on the angle piece. I moved the original leg the original out of the way. Super easy and quick.
Please review this part of my post because that’s what I meant when I said it doesn’t work. If you can get it to work with my .SKP file I’m very interested in how you do it.
Based on the post by @Box, I’m going to conclude that my method wasn’t too far off. The main thing I was missing was inferencing by the slanted surface. I knew about this but wasn’t too good at knowing when to apply it. In the screen recording below I got more practice.
Here I show a work around to the problem I mentioned (#1) about not being able to drag the component to match the top holes: Drawing a temporary circle allows it to work the way I wanted. Not sure why I need to do this, but it’s not too much trouble considering how great it works once done.
The circle you are drawing is giving you a face to align to, rather than it trying to align to the faces of the sides of the hole. I overcame that by first placing it on the face, this glues it to that plane so it wont try to change orientation, then i moved it so the guide points match, then rotated.
