Space finder feels like the kind of plugin that could become very useful, but so far (for me) it isn’t. It seems to run fine when a model is very new in development, but as it gets more developed, it just kinda can’t run. So if you had a project, and early on use the reporting function of the plugin, great, but if you had to go back in a highly detailed model for revisions, for budget, or whatever else, it just isn’t going to be a thing, and then you have better information to share with clients early than is possible later, so when you’re working really hard to get sheets updated, and good information for them, it still has to be done manually.
Also, I think there could be some serious power in space finder if it worked like a volumetric tagging tool. Think of it as an invisible space that everything inside of would have that information associated with it. So if I had a space called 103 mudroom, every item in that invisible space would be able to pulled for reports on xls output and easily incorporated into things like door, window or FFE schedules. If the space moves or changes name, simply moving that invisible cube would associate all instances inside of it with that space. This would also do away with need for complicated nesting instances or worse, manually editing all exported xls docs after the fact and relying on how good people are at making sure every item is properly accounted for by looking at the model and the corresponding line items.
Anyone in dev see this? I really hope this gets in front of some eyes and a little bit of thought put into feasiblility. Making window, door, and FFE schedules out of models is tedious right now, and I think in the AEC world, one place SU just falls a little short on comparatively. This definitely might not be a “for every customer” item, but could open a lot of possibilities for people in that and the interior design world.
@2atays making space finder work with more complex models is something we have had a bunch of discussions on internally and we have some ideas on how to pull various projects that are currently internal together to make this work, but we are a way from being able to get this even into labs.
The concept of associating elements to a space has also been discussed but needs much more concept development and user research.
It’s good to hear that people are looking at these kind of ideas though and as @DanRathbun the best way of getting feedback to the product team for this is currently with the in-app surveys. I’ll let the product owner know of this thread though in case they have anything to add/correct.
One thing you can do today in this situation is use a scene where you have all the detailed objects hidden so that Space Finder can ignore them, as Space Finder operates on only the currently visible geometry.