Or simply not allow negative spaces to cut anything in another negative space. I hate pop-up errors.
Whether it’s allowed or not, somebody is bound to try, and the user interface shouldn’t leave you wondering why you can’t do what you’re trying to do.
This is another detail that I’m comfortable leaving to Trimble should they decide to implement the feature.
What is the status of this? I came upon this thread looking for this exact functionality. I am a woodworker and I would like to have consistent sizing/spacing of holes, half laps, panes (ie all negative space) regardless of scaling. I thought dynamic components was the answer (I am evaluating Sketchup Pro 2017), but it doesn’t seem like the functionality is there. If you made this feature request, is there a way I could vote/support it?
While I think it would be quite useful, and would support it as a feature request (FR), I didn’t see enough people say “Yes, it would be a nice addition that I would use” to elevate it to a FR myself.
Part of that hesitation has it’s roots in its like complexity, both in implementation and in use. We routinely see people confused by how SketchUp (SU) uses “layers”. I’d expect Negative Space Components to be an order of magnitude worse!
I think this could be part of the SUs native boolean operations. Here’s some suggestions for changes in the current boolean operations:
Keeping the original components’ geometries.
(Currently sketchup’s boolean operations join the two geometries into one, if the original geometries would be kept you could change the boolean geometry by editing or moving the original components or reverse the whole boolean operation.)
Possibility to use hidden geometry in boolean operations
(that would basically be the negative space component described above.)
To have “omni boolean” components that perform boolean operations on everything they intersect with (selectable in entity info with a dropdown menu to select the operation type) and an entity info tick box to set whether a component recieves operations by these “omni booleans” or not.
Possibility to have nesting components perform boolean operations on components outside the mother components.
What do you think? (I hope that was clear enough )
I had written something along the same line on the wishlist:
https://global.discourse-cdn.com/sketchup/original/3X/0/8/08cae1738d332b6baed25073399161adc0be71b6.jpg