My most recent extension is now live on the Extension Warehouse.
With this extension you can swiftly hide the edges where groups and components meet, forming a visually continuous surface. Unlike a simple solid union operation these changes are only cosmetic and can be reverted just as easily as they were made. This means no information gets lost in the process - you can still calculate the volume of the slab and do all other things that you couldn’t do after a solid union, but also get cleaner drawings with less work.
Good one indeed! I got it hot off the press, then saw it vanished from EW, but I had a message in SU2017 Extension Manager to update, which did, version number remained the same but was now signed
The plugin can also be used for woodworking. By hiding the seam between two pieces of wood that are glued together you can achieve a result that is closer to how the built product would be experienced. It can also help distinguish permanently glued joints from pieces that can be disassembled or just touches (e.g. a lid).
You can chose to use a hidden layer for seams instead of just making them hidden geometry. This means you can have them hidden is some views, e.g visualization, and show them in others, e.g. drawings.
By user request a new version of Eneroth Visual Merge has just been published.
The new versions adds a workaround for an issue related to SketchUp 2018 section fills. The way fills are currently implemented, hiding a face defining the boundary of a fill removes the fill. I am not very pleased with this behavior as hiding a face in my view should merely hide the face, not change/destroy the volume defined by it.
The new version of the plugin adds an option under Extensions > Eneroth Visual Merge > Options > Hide Faces when Merging controlling whether the touching faces should be hidden.
Unfortunately, not hiding the faces has the side effect of them bleeding through the the outer faces. This is why the extension is hiding the adjacent faces in the first place and not merely the collinear edges. This is also why the old behavior is the default setting.
As there is no-one-size-fits-all solution for this problem it had to be a user setting.
When using Hidden Line Face Style, which is common for drawings, the issue with faces bleeding though ceases as interior and exterior faces all look the same. When aligning the camera orthogonally to the faces, also common for drawings, this isn’t a problem either as the faces don’t bleed through when viewed in these angles.
The setting doesn’t affect already merged groups/components. To update them, select them, reset merging and merge anew.
The setting is saved on a per model basis to best allow you to work on a project on multiple computers. To change the setting for all newly created modules you can change it and then save the model as a template.
In SketchUp 2019 there has been an update in how section fills next to hidden faces are handled. Now they should render even if there is a “gap” of one hidden face.
I am very happy to announce version 2.0.0 of Eneroth Visual Merge. The main new feature in this release is the ability to visually merge objects in different drawing contexts. Yes, you heard right! You can now take a wall inside of a group representing a level and hide the seams where it meets the slab for the level above.
To merge outside the active drawing context, activate the Visual Merge tool, press Alt and start clicking what you want to visually merge.
As always there is a 14 day free trial, and I think the expired trials weren’t migrated to EW2, meaning if you’ve already tried it before you should be able to try it again.
. I’m glad it works for you.
