Riverarch - 1 floor.skp (2.9 MB)
How do I cut a perfect hole in the floor when there are wall already surrounding it? I am trying to create elevator shaft hole in my floorplan but cut up short of the walls when the inference engine draws on the walls instead of the floor - even when I select the floor face before using the line or box tool.
Not exactly following but can you use the tape measure tool to create guides and then snap to those?
Riverarch - 1 floor.skp (2.9 MB)
No, see attached. I seem to be having a problem getting the box, or line, on the floor plane, even though it’s flat and not fractured anywhere and I’ve selected the face of it. So, when I try to delete the bounded area it just deletes the grayed out area and not the actual surface.
I think I showed you how to fix this in the other thread you’ve posted.
You have a lot of nested groups set up in your model… But do you know that in order to edit them you first need to double click through each of the parent groups before you can get to it. Maybe this is why you’re not able to fix things???
You don’t have a complicated problem here. You can fix things with the rotate tool… but you’ll need to first have a clean selection of the concrete box so that IT’S the only thing which you’re rotating.
Thanks, but this is actually a different - and probably simpler - problem.
I was able to more-or-less fix the elevator problem with your help so that I can rotate the inner cylinder independently of the rings, track, block etc.
But now I need to cut holes in the floor for the elevator shafts and I’m having trouble getting right up the edges of the walls of the shaft. Do I need to move the wall out of the way and measure the hole first or is there one of the many of SU’s great-but-obscure shortcut ways to do this?
or, Hide it, before resorting toward an actual move.
There’s also a view setting for hiding the rest of the model… See… >View >Component Edit >Hide Rest of Model
The Section Cut tool is also very useful for temporarily clearing up space in a model.
I didn’t think you fixed the model because when I downloaded this one it still had the same problem as before, but with a newly added staircase.
Well you have several problems. I would start making better groups as you go.
But you have one wall shifted down. You can look from bottom and see that one wall is not sitting on the floor. Its below the floor. The way you have drawn this I would group the individual walls before moving to next part you build.
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Riverarch - 1 floor.skp (2.9 MB)
Oy…all sorts of problems hidden under there. I think I fixed them.
And YES the hide option worked! I have my first clean hole and can now do the other ones. Thank you!!
I like to add a shortcut to the hide option. I use Alt-H and it nicely toggles hide on / off.
I"m still having trouble cutting holes in the floor, even with the hide option to make things easier to see and get around. What else could be wrong?
The file is now too big to send, unfortunately.
Can you put the file in Google Drive or Dropbox? You can also use zip to compress it.
quick look leads to my conclusion you have an issue and miss-understanding on how to use components and layers.
In SU components are used to isolate geometry and Layers to control the visibility of those. All SU primitive geometry is always on the layer 0. Having items inter mixed on layers, componets etc you will have a hugh head ach as you model gets bigger and can get you in the exact situation you have now. Correct his issue and think you will be ok.
Quick updateRiverarch - 1 floor.skp (2.9 MB)
more work required
Everything is on layer 0 except the elevator back wall and floor, because the elevator came from another .skp file and I also need to be able to rotate the cylinder within the elevator rings (well, OK, I probably still don’t need all those layers, but it wasn’t from the floor 1 .skp file anyway). The SU character Chris also shows up in the layers list on his own, which is the default with SU.
I count 27 components - some downloaded form the 3D warehouse. That’s not every wall and door etc., but it’s most of the things that might get reused. Do you think I need to make every wall a separate component?
Then would I be able to make the whole elevator island a component on its own?
I see I also have components I’m not using anymore, but they dont’ go away when I Purge Unused either. W
What to do?
I’ve already done more than this, but I can’t upload the 3.7MB file to show you. How would I use Dropbox or Google drive to upload to the forum?
Just load your file to dropbox, then share it , copy the link and post the url here so we can get access to it. You had virtually 0 layers on the orginal model. You have a lots of items in the component browser
No you do not need to make each wall a component. every thing does not go on layer 0. Check the skp I loaded for you and I have the three elevators assigned ( I called each an elevator assembly to a layer. You do that by using the entity info, and where you see layer 0 you use selection option to assign it a layer you previously created in the layer browser . Only components and groups should be assigned to layers. The steps would be:
- In the layer browser select the + at the top and then create a layer name, lets say elevator Assembly. There is also minus which you can use to delete a layer you do not want
- Select the elevator assembly( I s, then use the entity info to assign it to that layer
- You can now use layer to turn them on / off.
OK, I put the latest floorplan here:
But what is the email to share it with?
I had to fix a problem with the elevator and copy 3 instances of it back to the floorplan again. The elevator and track/track mounting/rings are 2 separate components. And there is one overall component containing both for when I want to copy and paste the whole thing as a unit into a floorplan.
I"m still having trouble selecting individual walls - for painting, for example - without also selecting the entire floor they are placed upon too. Even when I make those walls separate components, I can’t seem to click on them and get them to act independently of the other geometry.
I will also need to group the entire elevator island together so I can mirror it to the other side (that is, once I figure out how to do that too).
Thanks got model:
This looks much better than first one:
- Use the help center and search for flipping, mirroring. You can also mirror by grouping the Island and do a minus 1 (-1) scale.
- Still issue with layers. You have parts of the walls on layers but they are not components nor groups. Reminder :only group or component on layers to help with visibility control. Remove those two from layer.
- Painting behaves differentially if the surface is softened / smoothed. Read help center on that. If a cylinder is smoothed and you paint the whole surface is painted, if hidden geo is shown and not smoothed then only specific faces selected are painted. This also helps when material is added to the surface.
- Much better use of layers should be done and it will help greatly while working on some of the detail. Read help center and some times just make separate simple model for practice can help,
BTW: On flipping / mirroring how you have axis set is important also, both use axis ref. So do components when you load into model.
Thanks.
John McClanahan and I worked on this during a 3-hour Skype session and it’s fair to say we made major changes, though it may not be that visible at first glance.
The revised version is over on this thread:
https://forums.sketchup.com/t/mirroring-flipping-a-copy-of-a-component/36218/20
since we had to do a mirror too.
The elevators were not a problem, but everything around them was. Now there are fewer layers, but more logical ones, and more components too.
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