We used “Eneroth Material Area Counter” extension to take-off all the materialized area of faces from the SketchUp Model made for real construction project. Many thanks to this free extension by the author Eneroth. One Project SKP file (the V apartment) was attached for details. V apartment SKP file
It is so simple to copy the information in the msgbox after executed this extension to Excel file for further analysis.
As discussed with construction office, we found the need more information combined with results from aforementioned extension. Maybe “multi-tag” function for each materialized face can be expected. Please see the outline of the sketchup modeling framework. We try the sketchup outline to achieve the “multi-tag” function.
As we expected, by the help of Ruby Script, Sketchup can output CSV file to Excel. The CVS format was setup as shown. The hierarchy outline information of one floor architecture layout can be collected and recorded as the Comma-Separated String in each line of the output text file.
However, it was difficult to start scripting without the base knowledge of Sketchup Ruby Script. We studied “Automatic SketchUp RUBY” book and even tried ChatGPT, but not get good results so far.
-change the material names to an underscore delimiter rather than a minus sign
create a template DC with all the materials, and use facearea to get each one. note you have to use a conversion to sq meters as it returns inches
you can use Simjoubert add DC Attributes to populate the existing
then build each level template and apply as for the first level
You then have a system of conversion and a method of working from scratch
The reports will be individually based on level, viewable on fly in DC option. or later as a generated report that is sent to excel
You can export material areas + all applicable tags (and a bunch of more data) with 3DBI into a .json format. JSON is an open, human readable standard, that Excel happens to work great with. Once you setup your initial JSON import in Excel, whenever you export a new .json file Excel will with the push of a button update all information. Here is a video to illustrate that: use 3DBI to export SketchUp data to Excel - YouTube
As a bonus, 3DBI is actually ment to bring your models and data into Microsoft Power BI, so you can create immersive 3D dashboards, like this one for example: Microsoft Power BI
