It’s been a long day but I can’t figure out how to cut a component in half…I made this simple model to use as an example…would someone mind showing me how to cut this in half, either vertically or horizontally? I have a more complex model of a garage door that I’d like to be able to cut down to size but it would be really time-consuming to do it piece by piece.
Thanks for now.
Please help.skp (99.5 KB)
It’s not clear what you mean by cutting in half. Do you mean reducing by half or dividing into two? If you mean the former:
I notice that your main assembly has three components. Two of them look identical but are not copies. If they were, you would be able to reduce them in half using Push/Pull in one operation. Then you would only have to deal with the backing board.
That deals with cutting in half vertically. If I were cutting it in half horizontally, I would probably just select half the repeating components on one side and delete them. Then I would open the board, draw a new outline at the cut position, select everything no longer needed and delete.
Thanks for the reply, and sorry to not respond simoncbevans, I never got, or at least never noticed, an email that there was a response to my question.
To clarify, I meant dividing it into two, or in some cases, dividing it up into something less than what it is, not necessarily in two tho. I may build a garage door model that is 18’ wide and then have to reduce it to 17’9…I thought there may be a simple way to “cut” 3" off the entire model (1 1/2" per side) similar to how a section plane cuts through a model for section view.
This wouldn’t be a typical garage door most of us have on our homes where I could push/pull the rectangle and make it the size I need, these doors have different types of overlays (Ipe, Accoya, Kebony, etc), with rain screens/drainage planes/furring behind them, all on top of a typical garage door section. All of this overlay material is laid out on the face of the garage door to align with the same material on the house, many times it’s centered on the garage door too, so just taking a certain number of inches off of one end of the door wouldn’t work.
Part of this depends on how the door is modelled. If it is a single component with no sub-groups, all you would have to do to reduce the length (or increase it) is to open the component, select the end of the door and jamb and use Move to get it to the size you want. But if you have divided the door and frame up into sub-groups, you would have to open each and move relevant parts.
If the component is simple enough, this is the kind of thing Dynamic Components were made for. But if you have a lot of detail, it becomes fiendishly difficult to manage. And even then, you can run into the sort of problems you have highlighted with the material. Basically, you have to be doing the resizing a lot to be worth the pain of making a DC. Maybe this will all become a lot easier with Live Components, which will presumably take over from DCs. But who knows when a user definable one will be released into the wild.
Thanks again. I will take a look into Dynamic Components, that isn’t something I’m familiar with at all right now…other than a video or two.
The doors I’m modeling have several sub-groups so for the moment I’ve been tackling this by editing each component individually, I have to make many unique, occasionally editing a group without making them unique works…It’d be easier for you to see than for me to explain. I’ll upload the model I’m working on in the next day or two so you can see what I’m actually working on if you’d like.
Part (most maybe?) of my struggle is 100% my own doing in that I haven’t made my components or groups easy to manage. I need to dig deeper and understand better component definitions and instances so I can more easily know what I’m editing or if I’m editing a component that I can’t see… If I group things in a more orderly way, resizing and editing them would be easier.
What I’m doing is basic stuff compared to what the large majority of SketchUp users do (I don’t want to make it seem like I’m designing buildings, machinery, or anything like that), and not even the tip of the iceberg of what SketchUp is capable of, I’m just used to making much simpler model than this…Anyway, thanks again.