Before I start…
Forgive me if this is already a possibility in whole or in part, if it has been discussed before, or if it is not even remotely possible within SketchUp’s interface. Consider this somewhat of a knee-jerk post with nothing like extensive critical thought put into the feasibility.
Not sure if anyone’s familiar with Layer Comps in Photoshop – I only am on a basic level – but they allow you to save “snapshots” of your project with the elements of your project in different states, pretty similarly to Scenes in SketchUp. However, the feature that I’m particularly liking is the ability to have the actual colour and position of the object change and save snapshots with those attributes remembered and re-applied as you cycle between the “scenes.” Is that something that could happen in SketchUp?
For example, imagining a basic kitchen model, I would save Scene A with all my cabinets white and my fridge on the left side, then I would change the applied material of all the cabinet groups to black, and move my fridge to the right, add a new scene, and when I cycle between Scene A and Scene B, I see the two different kitchen design options, without any extra hidden geometry. In essence, I’d be updating the applied characteristics of objects in my model without losing their prior state, and Scenes would remember them, instead of only remembering Visibility, Styles, and Camera Position.
Let me know if that isn’t clear, if it won’t work, if it’s just crazy, or if I should make this a formal feature request (whatever that is…).
You may want to have a look at the ‘Scene Manager’ and see what can be saved per scene.
Material and location of entities aren’t among the options.
So youĺl need to have duplicate instances of your cabinets and fridge. One group of cabinets is painted white / fridge on the left. All assigned to say layer_white_left.
The other group is painted black / fridge on the right. All assigned to another layer.
Per scene you have either layer_white_left or the other layer visible. The next saved scene has the other layer visible. You’ll have to include layers in both scenes when you save or update them.
Thanks for this reply. I am aware of Layers and use that method currently.
Advantages of the feature I described would be that it would eliminate extra geometry (I know I can turn off the layer, but still) and more importantly, when I make revisions to the kitchen, I don’t have to edit two (or more) sets of components.
And there may be many other advantages that I haven’t thought of yet…
It once existed as a nifty example of Ruby programming by one of the SketchUp Team members (who I’m not even sure is still with the company.) It was published on the old blog site, but I do not know if it was migrated to the new official blog.
Some years afterward, I used his ideas to author a proposed extension to the Dynamic Components extension itself called “Scene Aware Components” and offered it to the Team. It was never officially adopted and even getting bugs fixed in the Dynamic Components extension proper has been difficult at best.
Since DCs are a proprietary extension, publicly releasing my modification will not be possible.
I think Ie seen that, years back. @MobelDesign, You can do with only one set of cabinets that will change color with the ‘OnClick’ option where you’ll use a previously selected set of colors, … Dynamic Components
That’s interesting @DanRathbun. I suppose implementing as a DC feature would be the presumptive route, though I still like the simplicity of a Photoshop-style method: move the object, change it’s colour, save a scene. No knowledge of DCs necessary.
Oh yes there was a topic thread discussion where I posted 2 version and was working on v3 but never posted it publicly. (I cannot remember why. It may have modified the DC code itself.)
I might be a bit crazy, but isn’t one of the attributes that can be assigned to dynamic components COLOR?
I have no clue how to make it work, but thot I’d throw this out there.
If nothing else I’d like to know myself