I’m having trouble selecting an item by the corner point, which is the only way I know how to place something accurately. I’m using a component from the warehouse called “1515”. It’s a 2d component of a extruded profile in the “8020 Aluminum Framing System”. I assume the thing you are supposed to do is drop it in your model, explode the component and group, then use the push/pull tool to raise it in the Y Z axis to your desired length. The problem is, after I do that I can’t find any point on the corner of the base to use to move it with precision into place.
The 2d component has a single point available on a corner but only one of the four corners, and it’s called origin point or something ( not the axis origin but the component origin). I tried to move the 2d component, then raise it after it’s in place, but that’s difficult to impossible because once I drop it in the model, explode the component and group so I can pull it, and pull it … then it’s bound to the other model elements so I can’t reselect it to make it a group again…
Upload your model by clicking on the Upload button, 7th from the left in the row above the message window.
Depending on how you need to move it, you can click on an endpoint between the straight side and the arc for the corner or you could create a point at the corner of the bounding box with a guide point.
I’m on the free sketchup web version. My models are all saved in the trimble account. So, uploading doesn’t quite make sense… am I missing something? I imagined you could share the models in your trimble account via a link or something.
That profile downloads into your model as a group nested inside a component. The extra level of nesting is superfluous, so you can open the component for edit and then explode the group. But don’t explode the component! That destroys it identity as a component and lets its edges and faces intersect with any other loose edges and faces they meet in the model. Instead, just open the component for edit, pushpull it to the desired length, and then close the component.
When you activate the move tool and move the cursor around over the component, various inference snaps will appear. You can click on one of them to set the reference point for the move. You should click a point that you will want to align with some other well-defined point in the model, move the cursor to that other point (the component will follow), and then click on the destination point. The component will be dropped with the reference point aligned to that destination point.
What may be confusing you is that the blue box that appears when you put the move tool cursor over a component is the “bounding box” of the component. It is just a visual indicator of the extents of the component, it is not actual geometry and can’t be selected. But, in recent versions of SketchUp they added an inference snap for the origin point of a component’s local axes. When a component is first created, that origin is placed at the corner of the bounding box nearest to the model’s origin, so it appears that you have a snap on the bounding box. This will go away if you explode the component because it no longer has identity as a single “thing”.
