Profile Builder 3 - Issues building assemblies

Hey guys, I am new to SketchUp and having issues creating fencing assemblies in Profile Builder 3.

When creating a fence with the assembly I have created, the profile members (top & bottom rails) extrude through the posts between the Start and End posts. This leads to unwanted geometry within some of the posts. This also throughs out the spacing of my infills (12mm bars) as the measurement for their spacing is not being taken from between the posts as I would like, but rather along the whole length of the profile members themselves.

I would like to use the assembly builder to model a scaled fence and use the Open Cut lists extension to generate a cut-list for the individual components. But due to the profile members being extruded as long continuous pieces, rather than individual sections between the posts, it throws off the generation of the cut list.

Hope this makes sense. Any hints of tips would be gratefully received. Thanks.

Assembly Issue.skp (456.3 KB)

A good start would be on this page Official Video Training Course. The videos on this page should answer all your questions.

Hi there,
Thanks for the reply. Yeah I found those videos before posting here and they were good at explaining the different features of profile builder. However, in a lot of their examples the profile member they use is extrude along the whole length either along the top of the component posts or straight through them. I would like the profile member to be in sections between posts, without ending up with geometry inside any of the posts.

Maybe I am missing something?
Would it be better to create the profile members and infills as spans?
Thanks again.

As long as the posts are evenly spaced, shorten the profile member. Just remember anything created by PB3 is a group and can be opened for editing just like the groups you create and they show in outliner.

Hello again, and thanks for your reply. This is a good point and important for me to keep in mind. I could of course edit each component that isn’t quite right. I suppose I just thought there would be a ‘cleaner’ way of getting the assembly builder to generate the fence ‘correctly’.

I am approaching it more from a fabrication view point, where you have the basic measurements of the path of a fence and would like a quick model to scale along the path equally and generate an accurate cut list of each component for fabrication. I could of course use PB3 to do ‘the bulk’ of the modelling, then edit any discrepancies. However, this could be quite onerous and time consuming on longer spans or multiple projects, rather than this small, ‘one off’ I have used as an example.

The infills not generating along the profile member in the sections between the posts is also an issue. As over a longer length, any cut list would be off as the assembly tool generates some of these infills ‘inside’ some of the posts. Resulting in a final count of more infill components than would actually be needed for the fabrication.

Thanks again.