I’m new to sketchup and lately I’ve been working a little with dynamic components. I want to scale a curved bar in such a way that the offset remains the same and it doesn’t get stretched and I’m struggling to do so. Is it possible to do this and if so what’s the correct way to approach this? I’ve attached 2 pictures of the situation. it’s a curved bar of 120;80 and I would like to be able to scale it in the X and Y plane but if I scale the component by size this stretches the bar. If someone could help me out that would be awesome, thanks in advance
If I’m understanding what you want to do, then I’m afraid what you want isn’t possible using Dynamic Components (DCs).
Within Dynamic Components, you can fairly easily prevent single parts from scaling - but only in the directions available through the Scale Tool. And the Scale Tool doesn’t scale in the radial direction you need, so you can’t restrict it in DCs.
With DCs, you can also build a component consisting of sub-components which you can prevent from scaling by fixing it’s size in the LenX, LenY, or LenZ attributes. But, again, that’s not what you need.
While I would like to offer you a solution to your problem, it most likely involves Ruby programming, done either by yourself or by finding an extension that already does what you need. Such an extension may exist. If so, I’m sure others will chime in with suggestions. As I haven’t needed this, I’m not familiar with any extensions that might provide this.
Not sure exactly what you mean? and there’s only one picture here, maybe the other holds the missing link?
One thought is to use profile builder which basically will save your profile and update it to a re-scaled line. This could also be done with the “follow me tool” too, just copy the end profile to the re-scaled line and run the tool, but profile builder simplifies it a bit. Not sure what amount of automation you might need? or maybe I have this backwards? in which case profile builder ac asign a new profile size to the same line.
Also meant to add, that once the path is part of the profile group, there is the “edit path of active member” button that allows you to similarly edit the path in the group and the profile will update to that new curve.
Its kind of a follow me tool on speed! and has a lot of functionality. It’s well worth the cost. However, I think you can still get version 1 at Smustard for free with limited functions.
The video demo shows some of its other capabilities.
At first I didn’t think about this tool as a solution as it’s not its not my usual workflow for using it…but Sketchup is like this in terms of figuring out different ways to do similar tasks.
I think v2 might have a trial too, so a good way to play with it.
Thanks for your in depth and detailed responses! I was not able to add a second picture to the post because new accounts are only allowed to add 1 picture. The bar is part of a bigger dynamic component and the intention was to enlarge it over the x-y plane without stretching it in these directions (by this I mean keeping the offset of 80) and it seems impossible as explained by in the comments by sjdorst. thanks for providing tools to do this in another matter but this is not what I’m aiming at. I gues I’ll go with drawing multiple of these bars in different sizes and hiding/showing them as the dynamic component scales in size, so the scaling isn’t too noticeable.
