I was wondering if there is (/or could be) a feature where I could use a bucket fill tool for when I have a model in my workspace. I work with solar panels so having a bucket fill would allow me to go along with a selected colour and click on the surface in the viewport to fill that surface with a colour. Just wondering if I can do this within layout as it would save me having to have separate SU files for having the panels be different colours. currently my method is to draw rectangles with a colour and just copy and paste them over where the panels are but this doesn’t seem efficient.
There isn’t a way to apply materials to a SketchUp model in LayOut. You can only fill LayOut drawing entities in LayOut. One option might be to exploded a vector rendered viewport in LO. This would convert the geometry within to LO drawing entities which could then be filled with color.
Might be easier to just add the color in the SketchUp model. You shouldn’t need multiple SketchUp files to accomplish this.
There might be other options as well. If you shared a LayOut file that shows what you want to do, we might have something for you.
I’m unable to share layouts of our files, however there are different pages where we need the panels to be coloured differently (for showing different information per drawing). Because of this we used to have 3 or 4 SU files of the same building just with the panels coloured for that specific drawing. Obviously this seems in-efficient but I cant find a better solution than that other then manually tracing rectangles over the panels (not great either when you often have hundreds).
It definitely is inefficient. You could manage this in a single SketchUp file with copies of the panel components with different colors applied. Each set of copies would be given a different tag which would be shown or not shown in the SketchUp viewport as needed. You might also use Color by Tag instead of applying different colors to the panels.