I just watched the six Nick Sonder videos and on one of them he stated that he uses separate SU models for sections and one for interior elevations and that they are “linked” or “referenced”. His statement inferred that if he made changes to the original model, the other models would be updated. Did I hear right? Does anyone know how this can be accomplished.?
Perhaps he was speaking about Layout?
I haven’t seen all of Nick Sonder’s videos, here’s the method I know for referencing models.
While Sketchup can’t x-ref, they can import components, and when you update the components, you can reload them in your model.
For example, you make a chair component, ‘save as’ into your personal library. Open a new file, model a room, import that chair. Then go back to the chair file, modify it, save it. Now you can go back to your room model and reload the chair and it’ll update itself.
1 Like
No. He was talking about SU. He has separate SU models for sections, interior elevations, and site. And they are all referenced to main design model. I will revisit the videos.
Do you have a link to the video (with time)?
This discussion started and ended last October apparently without an answer to the question posted there.
My question also follows from studying Nick Sonder’s workflow (his recent updated version!) but it goes one step further.
By the way, one of his mentions of the referencing process is here.
Scenario:
- I am modelling a house that sits on a lot and that contains kitchen cabinets.
- With one exception (see below), I want my SU workspace of the evolving house design to be a SU model of the house.
- I will create a separate site plan SU model into which I will reference the house model. My intention is that, as the house evolves, its latest iteration will be imported into the site plan (I haven’t yet practiced how to update the reference but I suspect it’s pretty straightforward) otherwise the static site plan, once built, will remain unchanged.
- Then I wander into the unknown… I want to separately design the kitchen cabinets with all the details and intricacies (and file complexity and size!) that goes along with that.
Questions: - Can I model the kitchen cabinetry in a separate file, reference it into the house model file (but without bulking up the house model with components, materials, layers, scenes, etc) and still reference the house model into the site plan model?
- Is there another workflow that would provide a relatively clean workspace for the house modelling yet allow for dynamic or at least easily updated cabinetry as that element evolves separately? Importing the cabinets as a component would do it that would also bring in all the ‘clutter’ associated with the kitchen cabinets skp file.
Maybe it’s just about keeping all my workspaces clean and uncluttered so that importing one doesn’t dirty the other! Or maybe there is another way?
Thanks…
J
1 Like
I started this discussion with the first post above. Since then, I found a blog where Nick Sonder was asked the question of how he updates his separate models. Here is the question:
“Anyway my question about his workflow is how he uses SU and scenes. He mentions that he doesn’t like to have too many scenes per model so he will use one file as the master file and then reference this master model in other SU files but only change the scenes. Any editing of the model is done exclusively in the master file and the others are just a way to alter presentation and views of the master. Note that I am not talking about doing this in LO but in SU.”
Here is Nick Sonder’s replys:
“You simply open a new SU file. Under File/Import, you select the file established as your base file. It then inserts the file as a component into the new file. After you edit the base file, right click or select the inserted component and select “reload”. It will then update the file based upon the last save.”
With the method of updating other copies of the base file figured out, how do we apply that to your kitchen scenario?
1 Like
Very useful information, ¡Thanks!