Flood tool for Layout needed

I had a look down the Layout requests section but surprisingly no one has mentioned a flood tool for Layout. Many times I have wanted to put a tile hatch on a bathroom floor and have shaken my fist as I traced around the toilet pan and freestanding bath tub with the pen tool. Similar issue when putting a wall hatch pattern on a floor plan. Anyone else?

I’m probably missing something but can’t you apply a pattern fill to the shape you draw with the pen tool…?

Are you seeking a flood that fills an area bounded by separate objects? I sense a clash between “fill” and “separate objects”.

What I understand is you are referring to is tracing around the walls, cabinets, and fixtures in a plan view in LayOut so that you can add fill to the resulting shape. It would be nice if LayOut could “sense” the edges from a SketchUp model as a shape. Maybe someday that will happen. Until then, though, I can think of two possible ways to make this work that don’t require tracing around toilets.

One option would be to copy the viewport to the next layer up, render it as Vector and then explode it. Erase unneeded edges and weld the outline of the visible floor so it becomes a shape that will take a fill. I’ve done that for the following. Each of the shapes shown selected with the blue dotted lines were originally part of a SketchUp viewport. It was easier to explode a copy of the viewport than it was tracing the edges with LayOut’s Line tool, especially the screw threads.

Another option that comes to mind would be to turn off the tag for the floor so only the walls, cabinets, and fixtures are shown. Anything above the level of the floor could be shown. Then draw a simple shape of the room, maybe halfway into the walls but on the layer below the viewport. The fill would show underneath the viewport that way. Here’s a quick example of that.


And with the viewport shifted over to the right to show they are separate.

The first method works well enough and for my example is a better option since there are no walls with thickness to use the second method. The second method is quick and easy and if things change like the location of the toilet or the size of the vanity, you don’t have to make any edits to the filled shape. Moving the toilet in the SketchUp model won’t leave a hole in the filled shape. The only reason you’d have to modify the filled shape would be if walls move.

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Im not sure if im missing something here so ignore this if im off point. I usually take care of this in Sketchup. I will turn off the foundation or subfloor and trace a room from the bottom and make that a group. Usually it has a thickness to help Z fighting but I dont worry about actual flooring thickness. I place all room flooring groups in one tag. Then I can apply textures as I like and I can place labels in Layout that will auto text for room name and sqft.

You need to have a shape in place before you can apply the pattern fill - and if it is a 40-sided shape that you manually have to draw, that can take up a fair bit of time.

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DaveR has hit the nail on the head. And these are good work-arounds - but they are just that and no real substitute for a genuine flood tool that floods an area of geometry and turns it into a shape that can be edited. Dare I say it, Autocad from in the early 90s had such a tool, and while it was not very reliable in detecting closed shapes, it is one of the few tools that I miss when preparing floor plans for buildings.

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I guess I tend to not need pattern fills for 40 sided shapes :wink:

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