How to show beams above floor

LayOut
1

Hi,

I am drawing two-storey house and wanting to show floor plans for ground and first floor.

Is it possible to show beams, above ground floor plan, in layout or I have to draw them manually?

Thank you in advance.

2

There is no native tool for creating dashed lines in SU or Layout but there are possible workarounds to address this.

1- There is a plug in that will allow you to create construction lines (basically a dashed line) It can be downloaded at:
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=44311

This tool converts edges into a construction line, but be aware that if you perform a clean up operation, the dashes (which essentially is a guide line) will disappear. Also, since dashed lines do not appear in Layout, this tool cannot be used specifically for that purpose.

2- Finding a workable solution may require being creative. A slightly different approach may exist in the following blog:

Look closely at the first tip because it describes using the multiple array function to develop dashed stripes on a road bed better than I can paraphrase. You should set up the dashes as a series of small rectangles modeled as a group or component. This should preclude losing the geometry after performing a cleanup on your model in this case and I have used this technique in Layout files. It’s a little bit cumbersome, but you can include it in a component library for later ease of use or quick modification.

3

This feature will be available in the next version of the plugin Skalp for SketchUp (www.skalp4sketchup.com)

But for now you can do the following trick:

  1. make a copy of your section plane at the exact same location.
  2. Reverse the section plane
  3. Make also a ortho scene of this reversed scene
  4. Place both scenes in Layout.
  5. Left to right flip the to looking up scene in Layout.
  6. Set the scene to vector.
  7. Place this scene outside your drawing paper
  8. Copy your scene
  9. explode your scene
  10. select all exploded entities and change the fill to no fill
  11. change the line color, line weight and line style of the exploded entities
  12. place this scene on top of the normal scene and now you have the desired result

If you want to update your model, repeat from step 8-12. This is why we copy the scene. The scene stays automatically updated by layout until step 7.

3 Likes
4

Using a wireframe or hidden-line style for the linework scene would make step 10 unnecessary.

I wish the Sketchup model tray had the option to set a line style to the scene in addition to the line weight. That would make it unnecessary to explode the scene to change the line type.

Anssi

3 Likes
5

I may not be as astute as everybody else, but the instructions seem convoluted to me. I am particularly confused as to what is meant in item # 5. Would it be reasonable to request that a video detailing each of the steps be created to better illustrate how to do this?

Also, when is the updated version of Skalp going to be available?

6

What I mean with step 5 is because the reversed view is mirrored to the ground floor you need to flip it back by using the Flip > Left to Right function. Else you can’t align it with the ground floor.

We don’t know the exact date for the release of the Skalp 1.5 version which will have this feature. Probably somewhere between August and October. This version will be free for all our 1.x users.

Kind regards,

Guy

7

@Guy,

Thanks for the quick response.