I need some help to try and understand and develop some dynamic components.
My main design work is custom wine cellar/room design and for the past few years all of the products I create to make each room are just a bunch of groups which I then copy across models several times, this process does work however makes designing messy and over complicated.
What I’m trying to achieve is to make a handful of common products which I can turn into dynamic components which I can save in one file and use across the whole software.
My problem is that I don’t fully understand how dynamic components work, I have been on YouTube etc… but I’m still struggling.
If anyone is happy to try and help?I would really appreciate it.
It is not clear what kind of help you are after. If it is to solve a very specific problem that you can describe, you will probably get free help right here. If you are actually asking for someone else to design DCs for you, you might expect to have to pay for their time. That may be worth it if it ends up being something you then use regularly.
I do share your pain when it comes to DCs. They were introduced to great fanfare a few years ago but have not evolved meaningfully since. They could be made much more user friendly and then become a truly useful tool. Some companies that can devote the time to creating complex DCs have worked wonders but for most people, the time it takes to create a DC means that it is often faster to create everything from scratch each time.
Thanks for replying.
I really appreciate your comments, sorry for not being a little clearer.
Since posting my original query I have done some more research and I think your correct in that dynamic components aren’t for everyone. I’ve been trying to understand and master too much and I’ve just confused myself. The way I work within Sketchup actually works for me fine, I guess I was trying to make things a little quicker in the long run.
I would however like to try and just make a few components where I can change the material (wood finishes) as this would help greatly. Whether it’s on-click or a drop down box in options, this would just be really useful for what I do.
Could you offer some advice on this?
Thanks
Ben
Happy to try but I really am no expert on DCs. I have uploaded a few very simple ones to the Warehouse which I use myself but they only reduce drafting time a small amount.
Before creating a dynamic component you need to have a specific group or part in mind. For instance a cabinet of a certain type or a shelving unit of a specific design that you can turn into a dynamic component. The only real difference between a dyanmic component and a normal component is the addition of attributes like material or size or position. All of these are attributes which you can set up in dynamic components (If you have Sketchup Pro) Sketchup free version will not allow you to create dynamic components but you can use dynamic components created by others in the free version.If your interested in creating dynamic components that allow you to se4lect different materials there are a number of tutorials that will help you use the material behavior to select from a liust of materials that you choose to put in the dropdown list you create. (Materials must be included in your model before you can use them in the dropdown list but there are ways to ensure they are included in your model by hiding swathes of the material somewhere in your model.)
I’m attaching a drawing that goes some way (perhaps) to doing what you want, but by no means all the way. There is no spacer, for example.
It’s a DC that aims to create a DG unit for most common straight sided quadrilaterals.
The key shows the various shapes it is intended to create and the input dimension references that appear in the Attribute Options. With the simpler shapes that require a smaller amount of data, you would just enter 0 for the irrelevant dimensions (for example, for a rectangle you would just need a1 and a2 and all other dimensions would be zero). The DC then draws the shape and face size. You can also input pane thickness and spacer width. There is no option to change the individual pane thicknesses but that could easily be achieved by amending how the DC operates. At present, the second pane is simply a copy of the first.
I realize this does not cover another common shape in glazing, the diamond. However, if you can understand how this DC is constructed, it would be easy enough to create another to deal with that shape type.
If it is important to show the spacer, I suspect that could be achieved but would complicate things a lot. Or maybe there’s some clever person out there who can see how to do it simply?