Wasn’t sure exactly how to word the Topic. Here’s my situation. I’m designing a “planter wall” that will have a planter in front and a “wall” behind it that’s made up of 12 diagonal panels. The panels will be thin 1/2x4 pieces of wood set in the grooves diagonally like this.
After I moved the cross pieces (circled in the screenshot above) I realized that the top rail of the middle row was too close to the bottom rail of that row. The rail pieces for that row need to go up 1/2" and then the rail pieces for the top row need to go up by 1/2" as well.
I had no problem using push/pull to pull up the vertical pieces 1/2. The problem is when I try to move the horizontal rail pieces I can’t figure out a way to select just the horizontal piece. Clicking once selects that plane. Clicking twice highlights that plane in blue. Clicking 3 times highlights the whole wall.
I know I could sit there and use push/pull to pull the pieces (from the top) vertically 1/2", but then I’d have to go to the bottom and push the bottom plane up 1/2". There has to be a better way, right?
If I were modeling it I would make the parts like I would in the shop as separate components. I would not make them one big lump of geometry like you have done.
That said, you could drag a left to right selection box around the geometry that needs to move and move it the desired distance.
Edit: As your model is now with all the geometry connected, it’s like you’ve carved it out of one big piece of wood rather than put it together from individual pieces. That not only make it a bit more challenging to modify, it also means that any joinery you might have modeled is basically gone and you lose the ability to get useful cut list information from the model if that’s something you want.
I actually DID make each piece a separate component and then dragged them over to the correct position on the vertical pieces. However, once it “connected” to the vertical piece, I could no longer select just the horizontal cross-pieces anymore.
Thanks for the advice on how to select just the horizontal geometry. I didn’t realize that you didn’t need to have the whole object selected (by triple-clicking) to move it. That worked.
btw- how did you do the screen capture video? That could be useful for many things.
What did you do to cause it to “connect”? Components do not connect to anything on their own, they can be placed adjacent or even overlapping without any interaction. They may snap into alignment when you move them, but you can just as easily move them away again.
Did you explode it or do something like an outer shell? If so, why? It really isn’t necessary at all.
This implies to me that you may have modeled each part separately but you left them as loose geometry instead of “wrapping” the geometry up into a component. The loose geometry will weld itself to other loose geometry. Here I’ve modeled the upright and made a component. You can tell that it’s wrapped up because a single click selects the entire bounding box. The rail starts out as loose geometry. It doesn’t stick to the stile because the stile geometry is protected in the component container. Triple clicking on the rail selects all of the geometry.
To make the component I hit g and then gave it a name. You can see that once the component is created it’s simple to make copies and like the original rail component they don’t stick to the other geometry.
If you make it a practice to create a component before you move on to the next part, you can model the parts in place which will save you a create deal of time and reduce errors. Modeling in place means you don’t need to know or at least enter as many dimensions. If you make the first stile a component and copy it to the other required locations, the rails only need to fit between the stiles. You don’t need to know how long they have to be to model them. And when it comes time to making changes, you only need to edit one instance of the component to effect changes in the other instances.
DaveR - That’s exactly what I did. I didn’t realize that I need to make each individual piece a component. I’ve done it before when I have something made up of several pieces and I want to keep them together.
