Pick Deepest Group Extension

I am in the middle of “fine-tuning” a model, meaning I am constantly changing small details about it. For this I need to go “all the way” into a somewhat complex hierarchy of nested groups and components in order to change something. Watching myself clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking (imagine more clicking right about here) before making ONE change and then hitting the ESC button multiple times to get back “out” again I was kinda wondering if there was a better way. I mean, the mouse kinda points to a surface so there should be a way to determine which sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-group that is, shouldn’t there be? There probably is, I am just googling with the wrong keyword I assume.

Anybody know of an extension to easy my workflow?

1 Like

I’d use Outliner to do that.

Hi DaveR - whoa - super fast reply! Thanx!! I kinda understand that. That’s one way off course, but it means digging down that rabbit hole or knowing what that thing is called and searching. But on a visual level - like I see the thing right in front of me (my mouse), I want to edit it, but I need to either interrupt by going to the outliner, or clicking the hell out of this mouse in order to reach it, I was hoping for a way to kinda select a “dig deeper” tool and than select it with one click. :slight_smile:

1 Like

(I know I could use less nesting in my model of course, but it makes a ton of sense to have it build this way, because I often have multiple instances of everything.)

I guess this depends on you being organized with your model. One thing I will say is I frequently see models with many more nesting levels than are really useful or practical.

https://extensions.sketchup.com/search/?q=deep%20select

Rabbit hole… :slight_smile: half an hour of testing and searching and testing I am where I started. Tried Deep-Select from Curic which sounded EXACTLY like what I needed except that I have no idea of what it actually does when using it.

Made a small video of what I want (I want to reach that wall) and what DeepSelect does instead… :joy:

Spend some time looking through extensions but it seems that there is no easy solution for this. And yes - the nestings need to be like this. Trust me. :slight_smile:

1 Like

To reach that wall for modifying it?

with CDT
dtc-03

Hi Mihai,

Yes and no. :slight_smile: (Impressive tool btw.) I need to reach it. Full stop. :slight_smile: We have these deeply nested component structures and in the end (basically before we commit to certain measures) I need to do a lot of checking and adjusting of openings and such. So no punching in new windows like in your demo but nudging a cut-out maybe a 3mm to make it fit with that used to be “design-stage” but is “production-ready” now. So I basically go in and out, and check and check and check and adjust where necessary. We try to keep everything for a big project like this 15m boat in Sketchup, so even if a specific contractor draws something in SolidWorks or Rhino or AutoCad, it always comes back into the Sketchup “Master-Model”, so I can check if everything fits together before giving the contractor the “go ahead”.

It’s not a big problem. Just one of these little annoyances… :slight_smile:

BTW - this is the same project “disassembled”… (I like to keep an overview of things…)

Oh. I actually found a solution. I knew I had seen this before recently somewhere and here it is. SketchPlus has exactly the deep-select feature I was looking for. So far I kinda didn’t want to install it because it’s a beautiful toolset containing basically everything I need, that I already have solved with other extensions. And I am pretty loyal to my tried and true extensions. :slight_smile:

But this deep select - well I like it a lot!

Mapped it to Shift + D, so I don’t need to hunt for the icon. I will try this for the next to week, see if it improves my workflow.

Thanks for the help everybody!!!

1 Like

How about Curic’s To Level?

I prefer version 1…

There’s also VBO’s Jump to Level…

https://extensions.sketchup.com/extension/584dba2f-6938-4f03-a1de-df61213cc672/vbo-jump2levels

And there’s the Backout plugin…

https://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=50233&p=543580&hilit=backout#p516874

1 Like