BIM is a theme to explore in one of the future sessions imho. Would you be available and arrange things with @napperkt ?
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Yes, with pleasure
Thanks everybody who joined us last night. For me the most fun part was the last hour where we started discussing different methods of how to do section cuts, etc.
Takeaways (for me):
- Thanks to @JQL s criticism of my section cut grid inspired a very cool solution: the non-grid-pre-setup-section-cut-method !
I loved that spark of an idea. It makes so much sense to me. - I also realized. I NEED to explore Curic Section Cut a lot more, thanks @Cyentruk for that input.
- The idea to just put a big rectangle into a scene to limit what is seen in a section cut (because Sketchup doesn’t know how a section box works) will also help a lot.
The session also made me think an about what bugged all of us the most. Hence, let me rant a little…
(Rant:)
Dear TeamSketchup
It becomes VERY apparent already in session 2 that many, many, many workarounds revolve around getting things to show up in Layout. There are many reasons of why the current workflow su__ - I mean: is suboptimal.
The most important one is that it’s set up backwards. The separation of a modeling area and a documenting area (be it in one program or as separated programs) makes sense. In our world we have Sketchup and Layout. That’s fine. Let’s use Sketchup for modeling. That’s use Layout for documenting. CREATING A SECTION CUT IS PART OF THE DOCUMENTATION PROCESS!!! We model, we move the model into the documentation space and THEN we start thinking about what details, what section cuts, what styles, what level of detail might make sense to show what we want to show. Why, why, why would we want to go back to Sketchup for his?
I’ll try to be more “actionable”
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Let us create section cuts from within Layout with a Create Section Cut Tool: This CAN be done in Sketchup, sure, if it makes you happy. BUT there should be a section cut tool Layout. It would work like this: Select a viewport, select Section-Cut-Tool, draw one line for where it is supposed to cut and another click to either side of that line to show the direction. This should be it. If I move this line it would update the section cut. Look at VectorWorks, they had perfected this, last I had worked with it. The current method of creating cuts in Sketchup AND create scenes, then to update Layout, then to find that scene, and then to manually label it and THEN to place a line across the corresponding viewport out of the Scrapbook is weird at best and backwards if you really think about it.
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Make Section Cuts not dependent on Scenes. Even if 1) is too hard to program, the group strongly feels that a section cut should be useful without having to create a corresponding scene. There could be an “easy” fix for this - make us be able to “select” a section cut in Layout. I have many many scenes in my Sketchup Model that differ in only a single updated - the active section cut. Every other thing about the scene is the same. I just need all these scenes because I cannot activate a cut from inside Layout. This is super-redundant. And as said: fixable.
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Give Section cuts the possibility of depth. The rectangle-workaround is ingenious BUT SHOULD NOT EXIST. Limiting a section cuts depth is really important because otherwise a lot of lines will show up that distract.
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Give us a “detailed view” tool in Layout. You know - you have a big plan - you draw a circle or rectangle around an area. You select the shape and hit “create detail-view” it asks for the scale and does that. Super important in plans.
I’d be happy to go into more detail about this if any of it is unclear. It would superpower the Sketchup-Layout workflow. We know, you can do it! The last 2 Sketchup versions showed that you can do big things!
@JQL, @Cyentruk and I have very different approach of how to section cut our way out of this mess, but all methods are workarounds. Fix this and supercharge our workflows. Even though some of our cool methods would be redundant. We’d gladly except this!
End or rant.
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I think this is a wonderful idea. The BIM part is what I am really interested in, too - is this something you could talk about?
At the moment the next sessions are arranged like this:
@RyanE - general workflow
@Cyentruk - 5D+ workflow
But I know that @RyanE would not mind switching places to mix things up a little. What to do with BIM is something we all struggle a bit still. Somebody who has already incorporated this into their workflow would be awesome. Getting supplier-stuff in? Getting stuff out? Cooperating with Revit users? Structuring you data in a BIM compatible way? Are you already working like this? (Or anybody else for that matter) This would be a wonderful next topic.
BTW - next session is May 5th 2025. Invites are out. Same time. 
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Thanks for the invitation! I unfortunately missed the last hour, does anyone happen to have a recording of that part they are willing to share?
I think the suggestion to remove the documentation part from SU altogether is an interesting approach - I’d be interested to see how this could tie in or contrast with f.e. 5D+ and Curic, since these seem to move part of the documentation process into SU (line weights, hatches, plan-annotations etc.).
Having said that, there seems to be a fundamental question coming up when it comes to adapting and streamlining workflow towards the desired output, how far do you want to go with an SU model before switching to layout.
Looking forward to next session!
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The separation of modeling and documenting seems logical and is an approach in many programs I have encountered. Be it AutoCad, VectorWe, SolidWorks, and Layout/Sketchup it makes sense since the functions you need to “put things on paper (at scale)” are different then the once to model/move around in a 3D Space.
A section cut is at its core not a 3D Modeling feature. It serves no purpose in 3D Space, it will not be built into the house! It’s an imaginary plane needed to “put something on paper”. Hence we should be able to create and modify it from the documentation part of the software. If a section cut needs to be added to the actual model space for software-technical reasons that’s fine - just hide it. It’s all about the process of WHEN you want to deal with section cuts. Never in my modeling process have I wanted to think about where to put all these cool section cuts. I think about walls, and windows, and furniture, and space…
Not exclusively. I also use them to navigate the model and work in the model:
- Sometimes I create temporary sections that I then delete.
- Sometimes I have scenes with sections specifically for that purpose, that I move around and reverse as in a scan of a building.
- Most of the times having the scenes at the right place for Layout which also allows me to model the critical parts of the model as well as draw details and work on 2D section faces that I add details for Layout.
The problem is still what you describe. A section other than a temporary one requires:
- Setting up the section;
- Assign it a Scene and setup active state
- Eventually create more scenes based on that section in order to display different aspects of the model with different styles or different active tags. (It is possible to do some stuff in layout via Sketchup Tags, and Tag linestyles but this has limitations, like forcing us to travel to sketchup and back and reload the model, or limits tag export to DWG.)
- Assign it a Layer to control it’s plane visibility
- Control style to display that section and section fill properties.
- Eventually create geometry to draw manual details
- Create a viewport for the section scene in Layout
- Assign it the scene, scale, viewport size and wait for a refresh each time something changes.
- Eventually do this for each stacked viewport you might need because you require each layer to be different in DWG export or because you cannot mix styles in a single viewport.
All these actions require a lot of work and iteraction between Sketchup and Layout.
They populate our model with scenes and tags that shouldn’t be needed.
They require a lot of manual micromanagement that hinders our work.
They require manual creation of graphical representations of section placement in plans, viewport names, viewport scales.
This is a huge toll in our workflow.
I think a section manager that would allow us to deal with specific section scenes standard views in Sketchup and Layout, Section detail drawings, section viewports, interior elevations and plan views of parts of models, clip boxes, non planar sections and all that sort of stuff that should be standard and linear but is convuluted and just a pack of workarounds, is deeply needed.
The first thing we have to understand is that sections are not only plans. It should either be possible to have several of them active at a same time in the same sketchup context or we should have several types of sections:
- Multiplanar
- Section boxes
- Interior elevation packs of section that should be grouped together, looking into all faces of an interior room.
- Detail sections which should be limited instead of infinite and appear in Layout where needed only.
- Layout they are being used and be displayed if user desires in all relevant drawings.
- They can be all of these but temporary so they don’t need to show up in Layout
As @napperkt said:
- Draw a line in Layout and you should get a section in Sketchup model and section manager or place a section in Sketchup and it should be nicely visible and marked, in Layout.
- We should be able to customize how a section line and mark looks in Layout but also in Sketchup.
- We shouldn’t need to place lines and marks manually at all.
- Draw a line that breaks and you should get a multiplanar section in Sketchup model and manager.
- Draw a section box in Layout and it would appear in sketchup model and manager
- Draw an interior elevation mark in Layout and it would create all the interior elevation sections in Sketchup and model manager, packed together in a interior elevation group
- Model any section in Sketchup and you should get the section line in Layout, box, or interior elevation mark in Layout
- Make a temporary section and nothing would appear in Layout
- Any section line in Layout and section that is active in sketchup should show up with section marks, page number, detail number references, scales it’s being presented, some of these should show up in it’s arrow, in both Layout and Sketchup.
- Section marks bubbles/symbols should show up in sketchup at the edge of the screen and not at the edge of the model, in layout they should show up at the edge of the viewport and not disappear. That way we wouldn’t need to zoom out to see which of the section planes we are dealing with.
More stuff:
- hatch fills per tag, per material, per object name, whatever (can be raster)
- Visible section planes opacity should be customizable. I want to see the bubble mark and lines but not see a foggy model if I have too many sections active.
- Selection of sections should be adapted so I wouldn’t select an invisible section plane. As the bubble would always be visible on screen we could select a section via bubble.
- Sections shouldn’t hide objects that are in their plane. It’s pretty awkward that if we want to draw 2D details on section faces/fills we have to drag them a tiny bit away from section.
- Section fills should be able to be drawn into by glueing hole cutting components into them, that would cutaway section fills.
- Those hole cutting components should be bound to sections and managed in section manager as a sub element of a section as well as they should be treated in a special way by Layout as it would know that a section would have those details and could create call outs for them.
- This would allow us to have also a Level of Detail for sections, where some details would show up at a certain drawing scale but be hidden away at other times.
- Profile edges on section fills should be treated differently as regular edges, just as in sketchup. Which means that if two fills connect, the external edge could have a width of 3 but the interior edges would have a width of 1.
- Detail components edges and profile edges should behave the same as section fill edges.
- Section fill edges should have a multiplier factor from regular model edges so that we could set them up as thicker than model edges.
It’s better for me to stop as I could go on and on.
The user should choose where to work.
The interconnection should be seamless though. If you change a section in Layout it changes in Sketchup, if you change in Sketchup it changes in Layout.
As it is right now it’s a one way connection.
Section information should work the same way. Section naming, symbol and page it’s being displayed in Layout, should be able to be customized in Layout and appear in Sketchup too.
So if a section shows up in page 3, Sketchup should be aware of that.
Problem is if section is used in more than one document or page, in which case it should point to the active layour document or the last document that had been open in Layout.
Hi, yes I’d be up for presenting how we use SU in a BIM workflow…
We’ve been slowly evolving for the past ten years or so, and the process is reaching maturity within our specific ecosystem.
The encouraging thing is that the folks at Trimble have really gotten around to the whole ifc exchange aspect of SU and we are confident that we can continue to hold our own without using the more well known software that costs ten times SU…
So, for small and medium sized architecture outfits there’s a lot to be said for using our favourite modelling software to better collaborate, anticipate and build better buildings.
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I created a separate topic for this because I think we are on to something here and I am a dreamer who believes SOME DAY this might happen!
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This is awesome! Anybody not cool with this? Shall we slip this in as Session 3?
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@StudioSKP please take a look at this thread for clues on section development in case you’re interested, as well as this one here.
Thank you very much. I will do.
Cassidy
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Just a quick reminder that Monday will be the third time the group will meet to take a peak of over a professionals shoulder. This time @paddyclown will show us his workflow. I had the pleasure of doing a pre-meeting with him and can tell you: it will be a good one! Paddy has been exploring BIM workflows ever since it was possible to export ifc from Sketchup (which is a while!).
So while I am still struggling with basic Sketchup to Layout problems, Paddy is data-exchanging in 3D with clients and contracts. 
So see you at Session 3: May 5th as “always”:
GTM-8 (San Francisco, etc.) 07:00 - 10:00
GTM-5 (NewYork, etc.) 10:00 - 13:00
GTM+0 (London, Lisboa, etc.) 15:00 -18:00
GTM+1 (Berlin, Amsterdam, etc.) 16:00 - 19:00
GTM+7 (Hanoi, etc.) 22:00 - 01:00
Regards,
Napper
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That’s great! I’m really eager to watch this one and I’m pretty sure I’ll have a lot of questions.
Thanks in advance for this @paddyclown and @napperkt !
You ALWAYS have a lot of questions!
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Can’t help it. You guys are thought provoking… it’s not my fault!
I’m interested, how can I join ?