I LOVE the new Section Fills in SU2018. Only thing is I would like to be able to have a little more control of the fill pattern. Right now, you only have the option of ALL objects being filled with a color but ideally, you could have different fills By Layer or By Material and be able to use Textures like any normal material.
Any thoughts on is a hack or Extension might be possible?
Off the top of my head I can think of 4 extensions:
Thanks Julian,
TIG’s Section Cut (Face) - Does not seem to work in 2018. There is no “Remake” in the context menu, does not seem to autoupdate, does not make a scene, and so on.
Skalp - Too Heavy! I tried this for a while but had to wait sooooo long every time you did anything with Skalp. An amazing solution all around though,
Dibac Section Tool - Did not try it… the suite looks great but VERY involved, meaning I’d have to completely change my workflow to “go Dibac”.
Curic Section - Just creates section slices or variants on that. Does not update with the cut as the model/cut changes.
Sounds picky I suppose but the new SU2018 section fills are super fast and completely automatic. No need to save objects to different layers, update all your scenes etc. AND its native/free. Its just missing THE ONE FEATURE to be able to have some textures.
I would assume there is some sort of API we could expect from Trimble whenever they get around to updating the docs? Anyway, that is what I was hoping for - that someone knew something about how the new section fills work under the hood so I could tinker.
It’s Section Plane Tool not Curic Section.
You mean this one?
https://extensions.sketchup.com/en/content/curic-sectionplane-tool
That’s the one I installed and it behaves as I described.
The video looks great but no idea how to get there or buy/download that software.
For more information, please contact Curic or curic4su@gmail.com
I agree it would be nice the native tool would have some more options.
In the mean time I use TIG’s SectionCutFace all the time in v2018 (Windows). It works nice for me so I have no idea why its not working at your end (auto update & make scene works for me - although normally I don’t use that). Maybe re-install the latest version of TIG’s plugin? Or pm TIG?
Hmmm interesting, maybe I’m doing it wrong! I’ll reinstall and maybe ask TIG. I’m on a Mac so that could be it.
OK, if Auto Update is set to “yes”, there s no “Remake Section” option. If its set to On Demand, it appears. Sounds like that is just by design. TIG mentioned documentation but I could not find it.
AutoUpdate set to “Yes” however does not seem to respond to moving either the section plane or the objects themselves.
Also, Create Scene does not seem to work either.
Sorry, did not mean for this to turn into a debugging session!
Anyway, TIG’s tool seems to be the closest to what I need. Also the leanest.
Still would love to see this become native!
Hello All. So, I ended up just working up my own script to address this issue (in process) but it may be of interest to anyone researching Section Plane and looking for options with textured fills…
So this is a plugin that seems to do exactly what I need BUT… can’t figure out where/how to buy it!
Look here
https://extensions.sketchup.com/en/content/curic-sectionplane-tool
Alternatives…
SketchUp Plugins | PluginStore | SketchUcation [free, but needs a manual edit of cut’s faces’ materials if not all the same]
SketchUp Plugins | PluginStore | SketchUcation [$$, but very comprehensive]
You need to navigate to their FaceBook page, take it from there or message them there. I noticed they are lately making their extensions available through Gumroad, so not sure if this is available there already yet.
Their SectionPlaneTool isn’t the same as their Section Tool.
DIBAC also has a section fill solution.
Thanks @TIG and @Julian_Smith. SectionPlaneTool and SectionCutFace are both more concerned with making sections rather than styling them per the example on the video.
Yes, Skalp is VERY robust but too heavy we found.
Currently, only 3 of @voquochai 's extensions are available on his Facebook page unfortunately.
Hi @hank, as the information @Julian_Smith said, I’m publishing my paid plugins in Gumroad and Curic Section will available soon.
@voquochai YAY! It looks like some awesome stuff you’ve created.
This would be incredible! Skalp is to slow. THIS WOULD BE AN AMAZING FEATURE TO HAVE IN SKETCHUP!
The native section cuts have only color (no material, so no texture.)
The native feature is part of the Style settings. These are accessed via the RenderingOptions hash. There is a property to set the section fill color and boolean properties to switch on/off section cut outlines and section cut fill.
RenderingOptions cannot be set by layer/tag nor material. They can be set for the entire model, and/or individually by scene page, if a scene page has it’s own style that is set to remember RenderingOptions properties. (If a scene page does not have it’s own style, then it uses the model’s style.)
So this means that there can be only 1 set of section cut properties applying to the view at any one time.
To have different colors or textures for individual sections then a 3rd party extension is necessary.