Section Planes Cutting off Flush Beam

Hello All,
I have been experimenting on setting up scenes in SU for insertion into LO using the book by Michael Brightman “The SketchUp Workflow for Architecture” and have followed his limited tutorial to a point. I have created a small foundation plan. Have made scenes to render in light line weight and one in heavy line weight. They stack and work and look great in LO. However, my problem is with that dreaded section plane. I set a SP enough to cut through the cellar windows, but it also cuts off my flush beam which I want to show up in the foundation plan. Is there a way to get the flush beam into a scene so that I can stack it on top of the others, or am I screwed because of the SP cutting it out? Anyone have any ideas. Brightman’s tutorials do not cover this. And what happens when I start building on top of the foundation. The SP will keep anything above from showing up in the scenes above.

You can set up Section Planes in individual groups so only those groups will be effected. So either group everything except your flush beams and put a section plane in that group, or put a section plane in each of your individual groups minus the flush beam.

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Hi Paul,

A Section Plane cuts only the geometry within the modeling context in which it was created.

Thus a section created in the overall context of the model cuts the whole model…
While a section created within the context of a group cuts only what’s inside the group.

One can have multiple sections active in a scene, but each section must be within a unique context.

-Geo

Thank you Geo and quantj.
That is the solution. Actually, it was in the Brightman book. I just missed it with the book calling “groups” as “containers.” Anyway, thanks so much. I tried it on my model and it worked like a charm and that takes care of horizontal section cuts within each separate group. Now, what do you do when you want a vertical cut through the entire building - a section cut that needs to cut into each group. When that is active, it will affect the scene where I cut down into the wall leaving the flush beam intact, will it not? If I make a scene for the building section and update, it will screw up the foundation plan scene with the flush beam - half of the foundation plan will be missing due to the building section cut. What am I missing again?

You’ll have to decide on your hierarchy of groups. Each group can have only 1 section plane, but you can have unlimited amount of groups within groups. And for different scenes you can control which section planes are active or not.
Here’s a nice video on section planes that helps explain it all:

More than one section plane can be active in a Scene (or not)…
…so long as each section plane is isolated inside a “container”.

“It’s all about context”
— Aidan Chopra -SketchUp Evangalist

Thanks to both of you. It makes sense, now I have to work at it to get the results I want. The video was especially helpful.