Hey I was wondering if anyone could help me figure out this problem or possibly do it for me… I have a model of the city of Calgary and its all in one group, when I go to explode it, sketch up freezes. I want to explode it because there is only a certain section of the city I need for my site model.
That’s a pretty large SketchUp file. I expect you see SketchUp “not responding” which means it’s busy doing what you asked and won’t respond to further commands. You could either go off and do something else while it processes the Explode command or you could open the group for editing, select what you don’t want and delete it instead of exploding the group.
If after deleting the unneeded stuff there’s unused components and/or materials, purge that stuff from the file.
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Dave… you are brilliant!!! thank you!! I didn’t even know you could edit within a group without exploding
That is a very fundamental thing of working in SketchUp. If you think of a group or component as a container for the stuff inside, you only need to open the container to get at the stuff. Exploding is taking the container off and throwing it away.
More of this analogy:
Opening for edit is like taking the lid off the jar. It allows you to reach inside and touch any individual items you choose without disturbing the others.
Exploding is like removing each item from the jar, one by one, and then discarding the jar. Each item has to be put in something else. Nothing can be left “in limbo”. If the original jar was not explicitly inside a bigger jar (the component or group was not nested), the items will be put into the model, which is like a giant jar containing everything.