How to plant components!? labelling, embedding... reports

SketchUp Pro
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Hello all - Landscape designer here - struggling with generating useful plant material schedules with the ways i have been labelling my plant components.

Been using sketchup for years but now I feel I’ve been doing it wrong! please help - I’m sure the answer is simple but i can’t get my head around it. i feel like a rookie here and am so boggled over trying to build out my plant library correctly this time around.

My goal is to be able to generate useful reports for planting schedules, with the following: quantities, pot sizes, common and botanical names,

  1. first question - how to you guys label the pieces of your plant compenents… I am currently building my plants with 3 parts inside the complete components:
  • 2d circle - as a ‘group’ - tagged as ‘2d circle’
  • 2d plant symbol - as a group also - tagged as ‘2d symbol’
  • 3d plant model - as a component - tagged as 3d plant BUT - question… do name the species in the description here? OR should i leave this as a ‘group’? i don’t like the way my components tray is full of nonsense and building block duplicates but is this just the way it works?

OR do i leave the embedded 3d plant unnamed in it’s description or just put for example ‘deciduous tree #1’ and put the specific plant variety in the description of the complete 3 piece component? i see that when saved to my files that labelling the plant as a whole 3 piece unit is better - since the plant names appear in my list of files…

more questions, same problem:

  1. IF the description (plant name) does best go at the outermost level of the component (the full 3 piece unit) - is it then at this level that i add my custom attributes?
  2. what custom attributes do you add to yours and where and how? ideally i’d like to see species name “acer” and then have a second entry for the varietal name “bloodgood” i.e.
  3. another question - do ppl find it useful to get into dynamic components for plant materials? i’ve just been resizing and editing manually to change for example the colour of foliage on the specific varietal eg.

thanks in advance everyone - i know this is simple… i just can’t untangle all the options and layers from the ones i should be employing

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I don’t work with landscapes but why would you use groups at all? Make everything components so you can quickly modify things as needed.

Regarding naming - I guess it depends on how you plan to use these in LayOut… if you only name the 3d component you won’t be able to use the leaders and component names in plan views / 2d.

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Can you share examples of your components?

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Struggle with a similar issue with building products such as electrical Outlets and tend to use groups as sub-components and place all the product data in the parent dynamic component, Have not decided which is the optimum solution and happy to hear how others approach this.

POWER SWITCH 2 BANK CLIPSAL_5.skp (36.5 KB)

so the parent is the component, but tags to isolate 2D, 3D, SYMB etc in documentation drawings, I have resorted to tags *2D-plan and #2D-elev for some products (SYMB= #2D-plan) for a wall outlet.

In practice there is another level of complication as some of the sub-elements are also independent products that also deserve unique product data and are therefor better as components. Components have the advantage of being able to embed their data in Layout text reducing typing and duplication although mapping the data to meaningful field names is a bit inflexible.

This was subject of a recent post that comments from some of the contributors you might find helpful !