Groups and components and nesting

SketchUp
1

Working with groups and components a lot now. Find myself, (possibly at times arbitrarily right now) creating groups nested inside other groups and also components nested in other groups or components etc. Things seem to be working as expected for the most part but it seems like I’ve had a couple of instances where a component didn’t make for some reason under these circumstances.
Wonder if there could be some potential issues with mixing up groups and components and nesting them within each other.
Any insight in general as to what I might not want to do to avoid issues down the road?

2

i’d say don’t nest any more than needed and that depends on the type of model you are making. Occasions to nest is for items like doors in a house that have associated hardware and you want to have it all stay together. Generally if you nest components avoid having raw geometry mixed in with components-- it can confuse things --an important exception is the “cutting face” edges you have in a “hole cutting” component.

There’s no reason a component would be prevented from being created, due to some nesting scheme.

3

One common cause is selecting only some of connected loose geometry, then Make Component, without seeing if the checkbox “Replace selection with component” is ticked.

But nested components or groups in the selection make no difference.

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4

Embeding components in groups and vice-versa, works fine, no matter how many levels of embedding you have. I can only think of two reasons why it might not behave as you would expect:

  1. You make too many levels of embeding and you forget the hierarchy. eg: You make an embeded component within a component unique but it still inherits changes because you didn’t make the parent component unique too.
  2. external operations make the component unique:
    If you apply external operations to a component like solid additions, fredo transformations, e.t.c. the component will most probably loses its connection to the rest. (depending on the tool you use it might become a group)
5

This might be what happened to me…

6

Thanks everyone. Gives me a lot more clarity/ confidence that I’m moving in the right direction. Building confidence so to speak.