My company is exploring options and considering hiring a freelance developer to write a plugin for Sketchup.
We have shelves of products built as components, and we currently use Generate Report to extract a list of UPCs/Product Names/Dimensions/Details. We’re hoping to be able to be able to export a spreadsheet ordered by object location, separated by shelves, etc.
If you know of an existing plugin that hasn’t come up in my research, or you’re interested in developing a custom one, feel free to contact me!
If you use the native Dynamic Component feature to add fields for information there aren’t already fields for, you can use the native Reoprt Generator to utilize that information.
Quick example using some advanced attributes and custome DC fields:
It seems like in order to do this way we’d have to manually list the shelf/bin– we’re hoping that we can find something that will automatically sort based on the item’s XYZ values, as we move things around a lot before deciding on a final layout.
So you are going to create a 3D model of your warehouse and place instances of components in bins on shelves? Are you then going to move them around and change quantities as the real inventory changes?
You can extract the component’s coordinates relative to the model origin and I suppose those coordinates could be linked to a shelf and bin location. That might be the thing for the extension to handle.
On a smaller scale, essentially yes- Generate Report is so close to what we need, but the coordinates don’t line up correctly. The main thing we’re looking for is being able to export a sheet so we can find which section, shelf, and product a specific UPC is.
Even when we do that, we can’t organize both vertically and horizontally, so we have to do every shelf and section separately, which slows down our workflow dramatically.
Why is that? The coordinates in SketchUp are 3D so there should be no reason you can’t get x,y, and z from the locations of the coordinates. Or are you just doing a 2D drawing in the model space?
We have all the coordinates- the problem is exporting in order. We need ordered lists of the section (of shelves left to right), which shelf its on in that section (top to bottom) and which item it is on that shelf (left to right). Thank you for your insight though!
You might want to try the “Find And Report” extension (available in the Wisext tools extension). It’s a general‑purpose reporting tool that exports directly to Excel. It doesn’t only export information from component instances: any SketchUp entity can be included in the report. And to help identify and organize them, you can add your own custom tags.
I appreciate the insight! It doesn’t seem like this would apply down to the level we need- we built the 3d model already, but we often make changes to product order. An ideal solution would update the order when we change the position of the objects. Thank you though!
Would it work if you use a tag for section and generate report? You’d have a manual step to tag each section including products, but that would be a few clicks: select rect, set tag (and color by tag will be a quick and easy check that it got done). If the shelves don’t move round much it should be fairly easy to write a Ruby extension to automatically tag by location.
