Hi,
Hope you are all doing good. Today, I am looking at creating a baseline model of a building and various design alternatives to it in SketchUp Pro 2017. For instance, I want to create floor with area dimensions ranging from 6m2 to 200m2. So, lets say, if I want the floor space to get incremented by 1m2 for each design, there will be 194 floor designs in total. As rightly thought, when floor design changes so would the wall and window area. Hence, it would be cumbersome to do each design changes manually. Kindly let me know if there is any automation tool or scripting available within SketchUp to achieve this task.
Thanking you in advance.
I don’t know of one. But increasing the size of a plan to such a degree will not only affect windows and doors but internal layout. It’s a bit like wanting a design system that will produce a dinghy or an ocean going liner just by inputting a length. Difficult to believe you could produce an algorithm to do that job.
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However, IF (and as @simoncbevans says, that’s a big IF) you could specify an algorithm to make the details changes you want as you scale the size, not just making everything bigger in proportion) you could use Ruby programming to iterate through the pieces of your model, and adjust the size and position of different elements (walls, door and window numbers and positions, and perhaps size) accordingly.
Thanks @simoncbevans for looking into my post and sharing your views. Of course, the change in dimensions of few parameters based on the dimensions cited in this post would change a few other dependent parameters like internal partitions and so on (dimensions cited here are only for reference purpose). Well, in the meantime, I am going through few options to find out if there is any automation script or extensions in warehouse that could aid in altering the baseline building for various design changes.
Thanks a lot @john_mcclenahan for sharing your thoughts and recommendations. Its well received.
If you are looking for a ‘data driven design’ of any sort like the kind you have with Dynamo (python based script writer) you must take in account for a specific algorithm or write your own.
While you could examine 194 possible outcomes, you as a designer need to take control which parameters are the most important.
In general, examining three options for parameters (area versus cost/revenu/energy-balance etc.) will be much quicker then taking in account all the needed input for the ‘desired’ algorithm and have those implemented in your script/extension.
Let alone the principal’s input, which often changes the moment you present the options…
If we all used the same algorithm, the world would soon turn into same gray mass, no more need for individual designs.
