I’m in search of a plugin or code that has the capability to identify separate rooms within a model and apply a distinct colour to all the internal faces of each room. Our workflow involves drawing from a plan and extruding the entire structure collectively, so none of the rooms are pre-grouped.
The goal is to automatically differentiate each room by colour-coding them, which would help in subsequent stages of our analysis. If anyone is aware of a plugin that can handle this task, or any tips on how to achieve this efficiently, your insights would be incredibly helpful.
Sorry to be vague… I’m just saying that Trimble/SketchUp likes to have user feedback and it sounds like you have some good ideas. @ateliernab has pointed the way.
In my opinion you’d have to use custom attributes and somehow assign them to the entities you want to identify as separate rooms. I don’t understand not wanting to use groups (or components). Maybe you could do it by using face heights (e.g., > 8ft) to define/sort what a room is. You’d probably have to have other variables, like how many walls make up a room (do they face each other?) or something that is specific to your workflow. Maybe your workflow needs to be changed or examined to understand what you’re doing/want to do, step by step.
Sorry - I really forget what the NDAs are. On a related note, I see comments on the Forum that Trimble/SketchUp aren’t doing anything new and don’t listen to users. On the contrary, they are doing all sorts of cool things and are interested in feedback.
You shared a very simple model. Is this representative, or would actual ones be more complicated? For example, the model contains only loose edges and faces. The faces are all either horizontal or vertical. There are no nearby parallel faces, as would happen for example if there were floors, ceilings, walls, structural members, etc. with thickness.
Is there any significance to the chosen colors, or are they just to let you distinguish one room from another? I don’t understand the end goal of the coloring.
The answers would be highly relevant to the difficulty of doing what you seek automatically. For example, I could imagine finding all the horizontal faces and then following their edges up adjacent vertical faces to find the walls, and finally finding the top face that uses the top edges of those walls. But that all breaks if the modeling of floors or walls is more complicated, because then you can’t tell a room apart from a wall or ceiling cavity.
See example, where I have coloured the different rooms.
The idea of applying a different colour to each room allows me to export the envelope of each room, and allows me to technically seperate them into zones for an energy model system I am working on. I need to be able to distinguish between the floors, walls and ceilings for each zone (or room). This is a similar idea to using energyplus, but instead using a UK simulation engine.
This is about as detailed as the model gets.
Looking at that model, I need to rethink the approach I was pondering. There are issues such as the fact that the ground floor walls cut the first floor floor into multiple pieces per room because there is no thickness and no grouping to isolate them.
edit: After pondering the sample model more, I think that trying to automate this process for something built like that in SketchUp would be an almost endless exercise in chasing special cases. Alas, unless you can change your workflow to make each room a separate group while drawing them (e.g. make a group from a room’s floor plan before push-pulling it to height), I don’t see any way to do this that won’t leave me pulling out the little remaining hair that I have left. Sorry.
