Components cutting multiple adjacent faces?

Hello all,

I would like to request a feature for SketchUp Pro 2016.

The company I work for has a lot of projects where the buildings we model need to be modeled with a paint break-line, essentially requiring an edge to run horizontally around the whole building a few feet up the wall. This provides a problem when I try to add cutting components to the building as it will only cut one of the two (or more) faces. This makes the project take much longer since I end up having to go in and either cut around all of the cutting components (which is usually a lot) or create special components for the break-line. It would be AMAZING if components could cut more than one face on the same plane. It would save me tons of time especially due to the break-line heights being subject to change.

I don’t know if this feature is already possible and if so if someone could help me out it would be much appreciated. And just to be clear I am not talking about cutting through the thickness of a wall to see into the interior of the building. I’m talking about multiple faces on the same plane. Sorry if I sound redundant.

Thanks in advance,

  • Huston

Why only one plane? In my ideal world:

  • a hole cutting component should cut any face in its cutting plane
  • if it is composed of two or more nested hole cutting components it should glue and cut any face within their cutting plans.

Edit: have you tried drawing the line with a texture?

Well for me personally I never need it to cut anything other than a couple of faces on the exterior walls of a building but if it could do more than that then that would be awesome as well.

I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “drawing the line with a texture”. I normally use the line tool to draw a line all the way around the building and then add one texture/material to the lower faces and one to the upper faces. Is that what you mean?

What i mean is that if you have two colors you could use a material with two colors split horizontally.

Hmmm…Ok! Do you mean just through the texture or through like a material property (we use Vray btw). If its just through the texture it won’t work for us because it will just repeat and we’ll have stripes, but if there is a way to make a material with one color extending infinitely in one direction and one extending infinitely in another than that would be perfect.

@huston3d

@JQL makes a good point.
You don’t need to split the faces with an edge to apply the different textures upper an lower.

Simply combine the textures into one.
Combined the textures with an image editor or you can do it right in SU with the Combine Texture tool.

Here’s an example model:
Combine Textures.skp (138.8 KB)


Oh wow! I had no idea you could do that! This is perfect for what I need. Thank you guys both so much.

If you’re using vray and you want HD rendering you have to be careful with your texture resolution.

I don’t know the inner workings of vray as I use Thea, but the method I was imagining is what @Geo explained.

The thing is that joining textures has a max texture limit size that I think it’s at 4K. (4096x4096px).

What I do on these scenarios is that I “make unique texture” then I “edit texture” in an external app and replace the texture for an higher version wich is fairly easy to do. Then I save that new texture into a folder and use it in Thea render instead of the SU texture.

Sketchup doesn’t join materials, just diffuse textures, so you have to find other ways of dealing with bumps, normals, roughness, specular and whatever maps you are using.

1 Like

Yeah I quickly discovered the texture quality just now when experimenting with it. I’m sure I could do something with the texture manipulation but I would have to do this every time the break-line height changed. Which brings me back to my original request. It would just be so much easier if components could cut multiple faces. Especially because there is usually more than one building involved. I could change the height whenever needed and it would be a quick fix.

One solution:

  • select all the relevant outer wall faces and group them
  • double click to edit/enter this group
  • create a section plane at the correct height (it can be moved like any other geometry, so if you place it at floor level you can then simply move it up by whatever distance)
  • r-click the section plane and create group from slice
  • remove the section plane
  • explode the group just created from the plane

Hi there,

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately my problem is not the creation of the horizontal line. My problem is getting my cutting components to cut through both faces after it is created. I just added an image to my original post so you can see what I am talking about.

I just wanted to say that I’m permanently annoyed by holecutting components.

The concept is powerful: having negative geometry that updates like usual components. What you can do with them is very limited though.

I’d recommend you to copy paste in place the components and attach one of the pair to the face above and the other to the face below.

You can use Superglue plugin or Reglue plugin, wich I use a lot.

Then you must hide your line, so it doesn’t strike through the windows.

Duplicating components is a silly workaround though.

Hi,

It seems that it would be a very useful feature if SketchUp could allow a component to cut out more than one face.

I kept ‘banging my head against a wall’ till I came up with the solution of creating a separate cutout component for each face. When I add the component my extension automatically creates the additional faces needed. It also moves and deletes all the separate components together.

The result is that all the separate components appear to be one.


Currently this extension is only available privately. Contact me if you would like a demo.

In my extension you simply select a component to edit it, similar to dynamic components.
Unlike dynamic components, changes made in my ‘Spec Editor’ window immediately redraw the building/ opening.

This building was drawn without using the line tool. (In about three minutes)

+1 for this feature request. Also how about exposing the hole cutting ‘face’ for gluing components? I envision being able to get a handle like this:

ga = cinst.gluing_area
p = ga.plane
edges = ga.edges

and then being able to have all the methods that a face does. I realize no face or edges really exist, but some how SketchUp knows where to cut the face.

@huston3d You might want to try my face cutter extension. NC_FaceCutter.rbz (2.1 KB)

My gif make was having some problems with frame bleed through, but hopefully you can see how it works. Choose Extensions>Face Cutter Options menu to turn on.

@huston3d

My Face Cutter Extension went in the ware house Friday. It should do what you need for cutting external faces only.

UPDATE:

My Face Cutter extension now cuts through thick walls with multiple split faces on each side. It even cuts through walls if the wall is a group or component, and the component is glued to the outside of the group.

In auto mode the cutting takes place automatically when a component is placed, and makes the cutting seem like built-in SketchUp behavior.