I am managing a suite of modular home designs and all their standard components in SketchUp. I have a case where the client may want to change the cladding on a particular house design and keep everything else the same. This new cladding requires a taller profile for the top-hat wall battens . I have tried options of modelling the wall battens as dynamic components and as standard components duplicated and ‘made unique’ for each length. Both methods have their pros and cons.
What I really need is to somehow keep the extrusion length of all these battens but change the profile to the taller top-hat. Is there a way to do this?
(I.e. if you were in Revit you would simply go into the profile edit mode, edit profile, save changes and volla, all the battens would be taller while the various lengths would remain unchanged.
if the objects have no embedded levels that forces them to become unique, having been built with same length dimension that is latter scaled then any replace selected instances will update
in other words have the same scale ratio replace selected from 3 components with same intial length.skp (47.1 KB)
simple objects, bulk swap like your purlins
for unique items (or different scales) you need to use the current formula and reference the size at a lower level then use the swap command via right click menu
this one works one at a time, best for complicated objects (doors. windows…)
I think I know what you mean. Replace component can work if I’d already had the time to create all the possible batten options for that model then sure I can just swap them via replace component. Or alternatively just have full batten sets in tags that are switched off.
I guess I was trying to think of a quick way to replace the profile to save work in the first instance.
This system is modular so some of the projects could be quite large with 10’s of different little bits of top-hat all odd lengths. If later on a new client comes and says we want the other cladding on this model, I was hoping to find a quick way of having the profile change but just appear in all those lengths.
I’ve just opened your example model. Thanks for creating that. This works really nicely if the objects are just differently scaled versions of the same profile. In my case the two top hats are notable different extrusion profiles. Using the exact profile means that when I cut the model at any point and create detail drawings at any scale then the sections are true to scale right tow to the width of the top of the batter and the width of its base (which is particularly relevant for screw placement).
By building highly accurate models it helps reveal and resolve real-world construction detailing issues within the model before we build.
I just re-read your reply and played a bit more with your model. I fully understand now. Tried replacing triangle extrusion with circle and it keeps the Y dimension but changes everything else! This seems perfect. Ill just have to make sure to build my profiles with those dynamic attributes in future.
