Hi @boris.beaulant - Question. We are experimenting with a new way of adding data to a part. There are certain advantages for us to not cut holes into a part but to lay them as 2D Components into the component. Hard to explain - here is a file. I was trying to export this geometry to DWG using openCutlist 2D but didn’t get the fake holes to export as well. Any idea? Is this possible?
Doors_Test.skp (263.0 KB)
Hello,
There’s 2 things to do to fix that :
After that, circles are exported.
Hi Boris,
ok. removed the face. Check. Tried groups instead of component-circles and as you said - that works. BUT - There is a good reason, why I would like to keep these “circles” components. This way I can change all holes at the same time, rename them, etc. - all the good stuff that make components great. So - groups instead of components would be very beneficial.
How do you flagg something with a cut opening behavior? That I don’t get.
You can keep it as component.
OpenCutList ignore cuts opening component because they are designed to update geometry.
So, in your case you could use this trick to flag component as “ignored”.
More info to understand what is Cuts opening component : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxaacnYvra4
I have to admit - this feature was completely new to me. Very interesting. And - YES! This works! So thank you - we have it now. Holes from components. Very excited! Thank you so much for helping out on this!
@boris.beaulant , how can you pass the depth value for the path? for example, for the first circle I need a depth of 13 mm, and for the second circle - 5 mm. Is it possible to place these two circles on different layers with the prescribed depth?
It works when you actually drill the hole into the plate in Sketchup - meaning really making it a 3D hole. However - I really like the simplicity of the 2D holes. They are super performant, I can hide them all at once, etc. so for us it would be sweet if OpenCutList would pass on the tag name of the 2D holes/line-work
As @napperkt says, depths work when the part is actually drawn in the 3D model.
This part …
… give :
Else, paths keep their depth too :
BUT, as all geometries, they are exported ONLY if they are not hidden by a face.
So if you put a path inside the geometry it won’t be exported, because it is behind a face.
I understand the need, unfortunately, tags can be defined on each drawing element. Both on components and on edges. And even if we took the tags defined on the edges, it is possible that on the same continuous path, there is a different tag for each edge.
In this case, it is difficult to define a simple and general rule to use SketchUp’s native tags.
Dude - you managed to get this plugin to export REAL circles and stuff. This plugin has become so amazingly useful for us - it’s close to magic anyway. So - no problem at all if 2D objects can’t inherit get the tag data.
Somewhat off-topic: When I export part-list-data as CVS from the “wood-list” it exports it with " mm" directly in each length cell. That’s fine if you just want to print it. If you want to take these numbers and mess with them - like add them or whatnot you need to manually get rid of these units in order for Excel to understand that these are in fact numbers. I couldn’t find a setting so far to export length data without the units. Am I missing something?
Yes, it did since February 
I am glad to read that the OCL is useful to you!
OpenCutList uses the native SketchUp model option :
Available from Model infos panel…
… OR OpenCutList settings :
Thanks for the answer. I understood. Maybe add to the OCL plugin the ability to also export accompanying layers that would belong to the respective path? For example, for a 2D circle, I can assign the tag D15_DEPTH10 and when exporting, this tag would correspond to the layer in dxf.
There is also one more question. How is it possible (perhaps in the future a standard function will be added to the plugin) to recognize and export 2 planes with drilling and front and back at once? Because now you have to choose only one of them in the settings.
How about a feature that attaches additional data in an “OCL” attribute dictionary to objects?
What you need to see it that this 2D export is a 2D projection from a 3D object. So by definition some data were lost. And one edge on the 2D plane doesn’t necessary represent a unique edge in the 3D space.
So using any meta data added on 3D edges can’t work in all cases. Some edges are hidden, cut, merged. The final 2D drawing is something else.
And added meta data at group level is worse because the object tree is ignored in this process.
This exporter is designed to avoid this kind of hack that consume a lot of time to users. And can embed wrong values like layer = DEPTH10 when real depth is 20 … what the program cannot check.
This exporter is designed to be able to truly draw the part in 3D and extract useful data from it.
Why using SketchUp to export 2D DXF if we need to draw 2D in SketchUp ?
I understand, but without common notation it’s quite impossible to export multiple point of view without bringing some confusion.
It would be better to use a file format designed for that. Like TCN of TpaCAD.
I would like to add - if you need to drill from two sides you will in almost all cases need to files anyway because you will need to turn the material on the machine once. So in the end - having two exports for these type of instances is absolutely fine. There is software out there like IMOS which goes super-deep into what you can automate in Wood-CNC-stuff but at a VERY steep price and at levels of complexity that are simply mind boggeling. Let‘s be happy at what we have here. It‘s Sketchup! And we can get cut lists and CNC prep-files out of it thanks to OlenCutList. That‘s a pretty sweet deal in my book.
Perhaps a separate tool should be added for part face labels with the ability for the user to control this and change the face? Then we will be able to export both the front side (where the label is placed) and, accordingly, the back side (where the label is absent). For example, this is implemented in the ABF plugin.
@KScher, Ok, but how would you use a DXF file that contains multiple views?
What software do you use to process it?
Can you show a DXF example of what you expect ?
In all OpenCutList features I try to keep SketchUp model as clean a possible. Drawing new labels or adding tags just for export are hack I want to avoid.
Yes, ABF or Simple DXF extensions uses those hacks. But these changes seem to me to be additional work that can be avoided.
Keeping it simple with useful features is sometimes difficult.
The “good news” is that the next major release of OpenCutList will correctly process cuts opening component behavior in the part shape detection.
Which will allow us to correctly define the holes with this native functionality.
