Thanks for the quick reply, DaveR. I think your answer means my understanding is correct. I should not “give layers” to components that nested inside other components.
I don’t need to show them moving into place. I just want to show alternative designs with a minimum impact on the original Sketchup model.
The model already exists and consists of many components. Each component consists of other components, and those have components…
There are alternatives or “modifications” that can be made to the design. I was going to use an animation to show the modifications and how they impacted the overall design by changing visibility of the parts modified. Show the original versus show the modified.
Some of the components are common with other parts of the design, say “Y Gantry”…
In one scene, only the components in the “stock” design are visible. Another scene makes the “stock” layer non visible and makes a different layer (“modification a”). visible. So, the animation shows the changes associated with each modification.
My problem occurs if the modification is down in a nested component. I think I cannot have a layer assignment to a nested component. An alternative is to have multiple copies of the top level component with each copy having a different layer assignment. But, this adds lots of unnecessary stuff to the model.
Taking a concrete example, one of the 30 or so components at the top level is “X Gantry”. X Gantry is comprised of several components, each of which have hierarchy.
X gantry
Linear Rail
Linear Rail Carriage
Part A
Part B
…
Head Assembly
Head Bracket
Piece 1
Piece 2
Piece 3
va
One design modification has a different version of “Head Bracket” in the X gantry assembly That same modification requires changes in other parts of the overall design. So, it would be nice if I could change layer visibility to show each modification.