I’m doing a landscape design which has about 600 plant models in it.
I need plant counts for each type of plant. Usually I just make each plant model a component and then I can easily get the number by selecting one component and seeing how many identical components are in the model.
For some reason, the plant components have become randomly unique. I have groups of the same component that are singularly unique, other groups that have 16 copies, others that have 3 copies, etc.
This is a big problem as it means I need to manually count each plant rather than just getting the number from the component properties. So a 2 minute task will now take me an hour maybe.
This is the second project where this has happened in the last few weeks.
You do have some dynamic components in the model but none seem to be plants, they are all in the house architecture. You do indeed have many duplicate unique components of the same plants here. How are you duplicating the plants, what’s your workflow for placing a new plant? Take a look at the screenshot below, clearly these plants were placed in a repeating operation that is making each one unique as they are placed. What extensions if any are you using?
For the plants I just ctrl click and drag to create copies. I also do it on a flat plane above the 3D design when planning the placements. Then I use DropGC to bring them down to the topography.
One thing I do though is create new saves often.
I always have 3 files for a project.
Project name 1
Project name 2
Project name 3
I save as new every hour or so as one of these names as i’ve had files get corrupted before.
Not sure if I explained all of that very well but could this be the issue?
I have an earlier file where the compnents don’t seem to be all messed up like this one.
For extensions, I have quite a few. I know that I used pathcopy for some lights, zorro 2, soapskin and bubble, fredo joint push pull, and weld for this project.
A copy of a dynamic component becomes unique if you apply its properties in a way that changes its internal structure, for instance if some of its parts are set to remain a constant size when the object is scaled.
You do have Dynamic Components - it ships as part of SketchUp.
You might have disabled it in the Extensions Manager, but since you didn’t even realize you had it, I suspect not.
And you might also have some DC components imported from elsewhere etc [they have DC attributes and watch if they get changed], so you can’t easily escape it.
As I said, unless you deliberately choose to make a component-instance unique [its definition then gets the #N suffix], or it’s actually an edited DC, then make_unique won’t happen spontaneously…
I don’t believe it would. There is something else going on. Are you using other extensions that deal with components? Are the components that show this behaviour dynamic ones (do they have configurable options that show in the Component Options dialog)?
Im not sure how the components became unique. My first click into your model selected a bunch of things that were “grouped” as a component so you had some strange nesting. Next I exploded this component and by the way I dont see any dynamic components. So the rest were just components with a lot of copies. I ran a purge and reduced the file size from 170 mb to 150. As a fix that wouldnt take very long you can select a plant that isnt a copy like the cana lily in the pic. That one is a copy! go to the components, select the house (in model) then go to the “parent” component right click and choose replace selected the count will jump up by one. Do this a while then do a purge of the components (the little arrow in the upper right corner) that will delete the ones you have fixed from the model. As for why this happened Im not sure but when you copy select the component choose the move tool and CTL. Watch the results the count should increase by one unless you copy as an array. I did notice you arent using tags. If you tag the components as you go it will make the cleanup easier. As an example tag Annuals or Trees or by each plant if that help you later, then when those components are cleaned up select all of those and add them to that tag. Keep that tag turned off so they disapear as you work through your cleanup.
I’ve always used the MOVE tool to make copies of components. Just today the other component copies don’t change when I make edits to one.
I select MOVE, click and drag the component, and then tap control before placing to make the copy. When I’ve done this in the past, it’s worked great, allowing me to edit one component that will transfer the changes to all of the other copies. Just today it’s stopped working as it always has for me. While dynamic components are included with SU, I’ve never used them (to my knowledge). Very strange…
One thing that could be going on…I use the Deep Make Unique plugin (awesome), and may be making a copy of a component that had Deep Make Unique applied to it. Not sure, and feel like I’ve done it in the past with no issues, but could be what’s going on with my model…???
(Example: Original component, made copy with MOVE/CTL, applied Deep Make Unique, later made a copy of a component inside this component as I was creating a cut list. Then noticed that changes made to the last copy didn’t transfer to the previous.)
I’m not familiar with that extension, but if it does what the name suggests it is a strong candidate for causing what you are seeing.
The name implies that it works its way down the entire hierarchy of nesting in the selected component (hence “deep”), making every instance it finds unique. That so totally isolates them that editing them will not affect any of their former siblings or vice versa.
Note: if this is the situation, the components did not become unique “by themselves”. They did so because you ran a script that told them to.
It’s a great plugin by Eneroth that does just what you describe. Once that unique copy is made, though, I feel like I’ve been able to make a copy from that that transfers the changes back up to the parent (by “parent” I mean the deep unique copy). I can’t say I’m 100% sure about that though. When I’m not in the middle of a project that was due last week I’ll test it all out .
Taking a quick look at the problematic instance entity info, the INSTANCE field says: “Difference”, and the TYPE field says: “Type: < undefined >”.
This implies that you have used “solid tools” on the component. If you used the native solid tools a component turnes into a group called difference and would off course get unique.
Using Eneroth solid tools or Booltools2 would be a better choice as they respect componentness.
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