How to check original designer?

Hi. I am an instructor who uses SketchUp with design students. An obvious project is that they design something original around a theme (e.g. classroom of the future/ kitchen of the future, etc.).
However, one problem I have is checking if their work is really THEIR WORK. I ask, of course, but now and again I have my doubts. If I think I recognize something in their projects from the 3D Warehouse, I browse. However, sometimes I am not sure so obviously I must trust their honesty and integrity.

Is there some way of checking an object in the student’s SKP file for the original designer?
Some meta data I can access?

Thank you.

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Some tricks:

Check the component panel, sometimes there are non-purged components in them, even when they ‘exploded’ the component in the model.
Components they made themselves, should have a path linked to their local computer in them. Right-click on a component in the component browser and choose edit tab or statistics.

There is an attribute inspector by aerilus which you can download from the extension warehouse. Then, you can inspect metadata (libraries) of the model or component definitions.

Another hint is when they exploded a 3D warehouse component, initial layers that came along received raw geometry (faces and adges)

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You can check the credits in the model info, but this isn’t foolproof. If they explode it and put it into a new file, then the credits will be lost.

If you want something more foolproof, you could require that they screen capture the entire 3D modeling process… then do a time lapse or something. I don’t know… Maybe that’s a bit too much. You wouldn’t want to make your students feel too under inspection.

You could ask them how they modeled it and if they don’t know how, then that’s a sign they might’ve downloaded it. Most of the time though, people will at least vaguely remember a few parts of the drawing process.

This is definitely a problem… People deserve their credits and it should be easier to check if if a model is really your student’s work.

You know how Google can do an image search to find similar photos? Well, what if the 3D Warehouse could do a search for similar models?

This is terrific advice. Thank you very much.

Thank you. I do trust my students. Sometimes one has to be certain though as this query may be raised.

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This is what I use…

Attribute Inspector
A viewer and editor for entity and model attributes.
https://extensions.sketchup.com/en/content/attribute-inspector

Good suggestions all: yea, there isn’t a great way, except like cheating on math tests, making them show their work by saving versions of the file while they’re working on it. If they build Rome in a day, you know something’s up.

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I see two issues here.

The first is the serious one: no one should try passing something designed by someone else as their own work. IMO this applies to the part that comprises the actual design.

The second is about the presentation, where it is customary to use, for instance, objects solely in the purpose of giving entourage and scale to the project. Unless the course is about modeling rather than design skills, I wouldn’t try banning third party content - it has always been used, from the days of stamps, Letraset rubbings and zip-a-tone and stencils (I shudder thinking of these).

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There is an extension that can quickly display the ID of object:

The ID’s of the Object are always incremental when drawing yourself, when downloaded from warehouse or copy-pasted, the order gets disrupted…

usage:

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