Kind of a weird idea, but this occurred to me while I was trying to sketch out a trellis using cattle panels for the main part. Each section requires only a part of a cattle panel (which are sold as 50"x16’ units), so in real life, the panels must be cut to fit. Representing this in SketchUp, the only way to make this work that I can think of is
- Build each element up separately, which is boring.
- Take a stock cattle panel (or build one) and then cut it using a tool like Zorro. This probably works best if all the sub-elements (individual wires) are groups rather than components. However, you’re left with something other than a solid (the ends of each wire cut is sliced off), and there’s no obvious way to fix this.
- Make the panel out of individual sub-components and then remove ones you don’t want, and resize the ones you do. BUT, once you have this set up, you also need to rename every last sub-component.
It’s the third case I’m thinking of when I say that it might be useful to have scoped components. That is, the name doesn’t need to change if you change the size within a given parent component; all the same-named components within that scope can change, too, but it won’t change any other instances’ implementations.
For now, I’m probably going to change the cattle panel model to using groups, and using method (2), but it seems to me that a scoped component approach could be useful for other things. Thoughts?