I’m a hobbyist user of SketchUp Make. I dabble in designing things including plans for homes and structures. As these designs become more detailed, I add appliances and fixtures that I design and make components. AFAIK those components are available only to that file.
Is there a way to share the components among files? I don’t want to clutter the 3D Warehouse with my crude results, some of which I prefer to keep proprietary.
You can make your own local collections of coomponents. Ther are several options for that. One would be to collect the components, such as appliances into a single SketchUp model session. If they already exist in other SketchUp models you can copy them from those models and paste them into a new file. Then in the Components panel click on the Details menu to the right of the dropdown list field and click on Save collection as …
Another way would be to open the secondary pane of the Components panel using the button immediately under the X in the top right corner of the Components panel. Open the Details menu and select Open or Create a collection … Create the desired collection folder and with it open, drag the component thumbnails from In Model in the top window to the collection in the lower pane.
You can open that secondary pane and set it to the desired collection to save future components by dragging their thumbnails down. This is a handy way to build up your collections.
Here I have opended a model I’ve been working on showing the In Model components in the top window and my existing Higes collection in the lower window so I can add another higne component to it.
By the way, you probably wouldn’t want to use the 3D Warehouse to store your components. It hasn’t supported SketchUp 2017 for about six years and it wouldn’t leave you with .skp files you could download into your projects. Instead you would have to search for them in your web browser, download the Collada version, unzip the downloaded file to extract the contents and then import the included .dae file into your project. All in all a huge waste of time when you can create your local collections and access them instantly.
Thanks, Dave.
