probably this has been all discussed many times, but I simply cannot figure things out aven after few days. I’ve done quite some youtube tutorials, but rarley I get answers to my problems. I will appreciate your help:
1.) Accidental merging objects together.
For a woodworkign project I created indents in table legs, then wrote rectangle in the voids and pushed/pulled those perpendicular over the width of the table. But some of those vertical elements are created as separate objects, while some are shown like with visible inner structure (like they are out of glass) and when I click on them, I select the object with legs and other elements.
See on image:
upper vertical element somehow merged with legs structure, I did not want that!
while the middle one got created just fine, as a separate object, exactly as it will be assembled. That’s OK
Where did I miss the point?
1a.) Is it somehow possible to dis-join the accidentally merged objects, like the red-one marked on my picture? Sometimes it takes me an hour of work to figure out, ouch…I did it wrong, now what? Start over?
2.) Object copies do not reflect changes
When creating element copies, I do CTRL+MOVE to get a copy. But it does not matter if I make this object a COMPONENT first or not, I simply cannot get changes to the object to be repeated on all copies.
Where am I doing the mistake?
3,) I removed the wrongfully added vertical plank, and I could not do it without deleting one face of existing object. How can I “close” the accidentally opened object side back again? (sorry, cannot add 2nd image…)
Most likely you’re not implementing groups the SketchUp way, and/or trying to use layers or tags incorrectly. It’s hard to say, but I do know that if you work strictly in groups you will never have an issue with anything sticking together unintentionally. You may want to go back to the fundamentals to brush up on groups.
Hi Monospaced,
I think SOME of the reasons (although there might be more of them) in my case, which are causing problems, are:
Some of vertical planks were created in perpendicular plane first as either 0 degrees or 90 degrees rectangles, while other planks vere created other way, then rotated into a void, and finally pushed/pulled into 3D
When I was creating those vertical connecting planks, sometimes I begun drawing rectangle on one axis, then pulled vertically accross, while with others I first draw 2D rectangle across, then pull out in depth of void, and pull again in width axis.
Geez, a week later still struggling with selecting, moving, merging, copying…
For example, I make simle plain rectangle, pull it into a plank, then I COPY it. Now here I get lost:
If I move the copied object further away from original, so that they do NOT TOUCH each other, then I get 2 separate objects
but if copy and original TOUCH each other, they become merged
I tried to create GROUP out of original object before copying, and I was sucessful…but not for long. 1st copy was separate object, then I made a copy of a copy, and 2nd copy becomes MERGED with 2nd object!!!
I do not get it anymore.
All geometry in SketchUp is “sticky” it will all merge automatically with anything it touches, this is how the modeling environment is designed to work. The way to isolate geometry is to “wrap” it as a group or component. Once any geometry is made into a group or component it will have a blue bounding box around it and it can be moved into overlapping or touching positions with other geometry without merging. Groups are individual, a component can have one or more instances which are all identical, if you edit one instance of a component all of them will be edited. In order to edit a group or component you first need to get inside the “wrapper”, do this by double clicking on the group or component (or right click and chose edit group/ edit component). The blue bounding box will change to a dotted line box and the rest of the model will dim indicating that you are working “inside the wrapper” of that particular group or component, click anywhere outside of the box to get back to the rest of the model.
Best practice is to make a group or component immediately out of each separate piece as you model, do not leave anything as raw geometry.
In the above example of failure you explained it sounds like you may have opened the group for editing before you made your second copy, so you are actually moving a copy of the raw geometry inside the group. Click once on an object, if it has a blue bounding box then it’s a group or component and safe to move.
In general, I would say use Components rather than groups. And give each one a meaningful name as soon as you create it (you are prompted for a name as part of the process of creating a component). You can give Groups Instance names, but only after you have created them, using Entity Info.
It isn’t very helpful to open the Outliner window and see only Group after Group after further unnamed Group - you’ve no idea which one is what. Whereas if you give a component a name like Front Door, Side Window, Roof, you have a good idea of what each component is for.
Also, if you delete a Group in a model, it’s gone. If you delete the last copy of a Component, it still remains in the model, and you can get a replacement copy from the Component browser until you Purge the model, when any un-used components will be deleted.
They are NOT deleted if they are in the model, but hidden, or on a tag/layer that isn’t visible.
