I’ve been working on a woodworking plan project for the last couple of days. I sent it off to my editor yesterday got the edits today, made the changes and sent off the revisions within about 15 minutes.
Having used components for all of the parts I only needed to handle one instance of each definition in the model and knew they were all edited correctly. Thanks to TIG’s extension, all the labels with dimensions in the LO file were fixed with two clicks in SketchUp, and all of the dimensions in the LO file updated automatically to reflect the changes. The only way it could get any easier is if someone else did it for me.
Sorry. It’s called Component Descriptor. It was a thing he wrote for me. It’s available from Sketchucation. It fills the component description field and makes labels like these using LO’s Auto Text feature. There are various formatting options for it.
Dimensions are based on the size of the bounding box. Thickness is the shortest dimension, Length is the longest dimension. Component axis orientation would make a difference in the reported dimensions if they are not aligned with the geometry. For example a component modeled this way would be reported as much larger than it really is.
The various cut list extensions and even the native Report Generator also report bounding box dimensions so it’s important to make sure the component axes are correctly aligned.
Hi again, Dave. After I went through the settings, I noticed that there is a flag for sorting which defaults to “true”. If you change the setting to “false”, the assignment of the dimensions changes to Thick, Width, Length equals X, Y, Z (R, G, B) based upon the axis of the component. If you process components, then change the axis or settings, you will need to process them again. Be careful or you could end up with a mix of assignment settings in your model.
I am not sure that I would want the Length to be anything other than the longest dimension, but I could see a scenario where I would want the Thickness and Width swapped. But the important point is that I can decide. (Those pesky developers who add features!)
I’ve never wanted or used that setting and had forgotten about it.
I’ve never wanted to swap thickness and width but once in a great while I need to swap width and thickness. I just delivered plans for an Arts and Crafts style coffee table that has some false tenons. In that case I needed to make that swap because length is always taken as the grain direction but in this case the long dimension is across the grain.
This is a fantastic extension. Thanks to @DaveR for specifying and documented it and TIG for coding and offerring it.
I have always liked this style of exploded view with component dimensions often seen in magazines. When I tried to do the same style on my own in Layout, it required alot of manual typing, checking and sometimes was prone to user error.
I just used Component Descriptor with a recent design where some components needed resizing. As Dave said, after the updated items were selected again with Component Descriptor, the sizes were updated, then I updated model reference in Layout and boom- done!.
Also I very much like the ability to customize the display of the TxLxW on one line or several. Below example part of an exploded view:
