I am doing a floor plan in Sketchup. In order to easily move and remove walls and stuff, I have been using groups (to prevent geometry merging of walls/floors/ceiling) and layers (walls on separate layer, floor on separate layer, internal walls on yet another layer).
Now I want to measure the area of my rooms, but the “face” I’m selecting selects the whole floor (and not just particular room) due to the grouping.
Is there a simple way to ungroup everything and merge all layers together?
Or perhaps is there another way to measure area?
Draw a shape that encloses the floor you are looking for - the area is displayed in the ‘entity info’ window; Draw = “trace” shape = a fully enclosed face
(This is probably lots easier than exploding and merging geometry.)
“Ungrouping” is called Exploding in SketchUp. Select everything, right-click and select “explode”. Repeat until the command is greyed out.
Layers: Open the Window menu>Layers window, select the layers you want to merge and press Delete. SketchUp will ask you what to do with the objects on the layers - erase or move to the current or default (0) layer. The layer 0 cannot be deleted.
If you have your model nicely grouped and (as usual) foresee the need to make modifications to it even in the future, I would preserve the grouping, and create the areas as a yet another new group (as Gadget who is a faster typist than me seems to hint). I would start with a horizontal rectangle larger than your house, group it and place it at a height that intersects all your walls. Then, inside the group, select the face, right-click and select “Intersect with model” from the context menu, and, finally, in the result, delete all the faces that are not part of the areas you need. It’s work, but you are more future-proof.
Note too that painting the areas with different materials lets you get totals easily by right-clicking the material in question in the materials browser and selecting Area from the context menu.
If all the existing geometry is grouped properly and you are just looking for an area, then what you are drawing to get the area is simply a guideline and temporary geometry - in theory it doesn’t need to really be in it’s own group but it’s probably good practice.
(Once created you can simply double click on the surface to select it and all the edges - either to group them or delete them. Personally I would group first, then delete: If you simply erase, then any edges that happen to be shared with another face will be erased and the ‘shared’ face will disappear. By grouping first, you ensure that it’s only the selected geometry that is erased.)
The “intersect faces” does work, but I find that it can produce some undesired results (door swings, furniture, lights etc making holes I don’t want) so I normally just create, join and shape rectangles. But a useful tip is that ‘intersect faces’ only intersects with visible geometry - hide stuff that’s irrelevant before using it. If you’re organised then this is probably the better method.
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