Creating multiple scenes

thank you :slight_smile:

It appears that there is an amount of confusion you are having with what you want to achieve. Maybe it would be well worth your time to go through the materials at The Learning Center. There is a wealth of instructional interactive material this site.

You’ll do this all the time using SketchUp. It’s not that hard. Also you could put them in GROUPS, because changes to a group will not affect other groups. Changes to a component (made by editing the component) changes other instances of that component.

Nice to know that groups don’t change but I use OpenCutList and it does not recognize groups unfortunately.

Thank you I will investigate that link. I do look at a lot of videos and documentation and try to exhaust all I can by just doing on my own. I come here when I have just about beat my head against a wall trying to figure out how to do something. I also searched the forum and found another discussion on the same thing that I was trying to accomplish but when I followed the reading I still could not get it to work.

Are you required to put all the parts in a component for OpenCutList to record the parts? So you can explode the group layer after doing your setup moves. Or do this eploded view version after you’ve done your cut list.

This whole thread makes it sound to me as if you are working much harder than you need to. I expect this can be made a whole lot simpler and easier. It would be helpful to see your actual project file instead of your example.

I agree it turned into more than I expected after doing some reading and video watching and attempting to do this on my own.

  • I did not understand that modifying anything affected everything.

  • I did not realize that having nested components the way I did also affected my model.

Grateful to all you here who brightened that light bulb above my head. :slight_smile:

This is the final product after I kept changing the model. I don’t have it in it’s original state before all the scenes.

The scene1 has the original and copy (as suggested) both in separate layers. I got rid of the top level component that had all my other components. I only did this so that I could easily move everything but clearly was interfering with my scene creations. The copy is hidden in this scene.

The scene2 has the original model hidden and I work with the copy by hiding what I don’t need to be seen, which was my original intent.

Untitled 2.skp (379.1 KB)

I found that groups do not work in OCL after contacting the author. I would as you suggest explode the group and make components to get it into the OCL.

Look at the attached file for some ideas about how to deal with setting up tags (layers) and scenes. There’s no need for the complexity you have in your model. I would create the tags/layers based on the kinds of objects, not based on the scenes. Also note that I only used tags/layers to control the visibility of the various objects. This makes model management easier.

The overall model space looks like this:


I turned off labels and dimensions for this screen shot to reduce the clutter.

Here’s the cutlist from CutList 4.1. The things you called spindles are shown in the parts section because they aren’t sheet materials. They could be in the solid wood section, too.
Screenshot - 7_23_2021 , 3_20_10 PM
I find it faster and easier to set up than OCL.

I did not move the spindles in your model. I think they should be moved. There’s no need for the kinds of dimensions you have for locating the holes.

Dado Stack Holder.skp (251.5 KB)

Ok I get it. Put everything in the model as I want it displayed (when I get to the scenes) and then create my scenes. Create all the labels for each object(s) that I can hide in a specific scene if I am not displaying that object.

I noticed doing zoom extents that all the objects, with exception of the dimensions, are visible (mostly) and the scene camera view ( if i am referring to that correctly ) controls what that scene looks like. In the case of the dividers scene, they are only displayed while the other labels are hidden.

thanks Dave…this makes better sense.

Yes. And if you want to show an object in multiple locations within the model space, you need to have multiple copies of it.

If you are starting from the 3/4 view scene, then that would be correct. The tags/layers assigned to the dimension and label objects are turned off for that scene. You could turn them on and do a Zoom Extents. As I wrote, I turned them off for that overall view just to reduce the clutter.

The camera position, zoom level, tag/layer visibility, and things like style properties are saved with the scene. Look at the Layers panel to see the list of Properties to save.

In the Dividers scene the Dimensions tag/layer is visible but the Labels tag/layer is not. Since the label calling out the diameter of the hole is really a dimension, I gave it the Dimensions tag/layer.

That’s a good thing.