Slicing Mutiple Groups/Components with a Plane or Solid

Hey Folks,

Wondering if anyone can help me. I am trying to model a Parquet Floor in a Herring bone pattern, Where each board is a component or group.

Note, I am using component/group interchangeably here, but understand the difference between the two. I want each board to be ‘separate’.

The reason I want to retain them as a component/group is that I want to use V-Ray rendering to randomise the the material so every board does not look the same.

So as a simple example I have my component/groups laid out as follows:

Then I would like to overlay that with a shape that represents the layout of a room, e.g. a cube in this case. I would the like to trim all the excess of the boards that fall outside that footprint.

I tried to move the cube through the laid out boards and then using ‘Intersect Faces → With Model’, which leaves a bunch of lines over the model, but does not change the group/components themselves.

I understand that when using the components, that is impossible as if it would change one of the boards, it would change them all and I would need to ‘Make unique’ components for any any boards on the edge.

But for the groups, it also does not slice ‘into’ the group…

I could ‘explode’ the boards, but then loose the ability to let V-Ray do it’s randomisation magic.

From what I read I would have to copy all the lines created by the ‘Intersect Faces’, open each group/model on the boundary (and make a unique component if using components), ‘paste in place’ and remove and excess manually. which would work, but would be a pain for the ~2000 boards I need in my model…

Does anyone know of a better way? I had a look at creating a V-Ray texture with the board’s laid out in a herringbone pattern, but it is no random enough for my liking and rendering.

Does anyone know of a plugin that could do the trick?

Thanks

G./

Instead of using just an edge to do the cutting, model a box that entirely encompasses the parts of the boards you want to cut. Make the box a solid group/ Then use the Trim tool from the native Solid tools to trim each of the boards. They’ll be converted to groups and thus be different objects.

It would actually be simpler to create a texture that you can apply to the floor shape. Then you don’t have to cut all these objects. I would create the texture, and have done so, in SketchUp. A larger enough texture can have the randomness that you want.

Hello,
First, why don’t you use a texture instead of modelling each board ? You can find plenty of parquet textures for vray all over the web.
If you really want to model them, what’s the matter having them overlapping the boundaries ? Should some parts of the boards getting inside the walls, it won’t affect your vray renderings ?
Otherwise, there is this plugin by TIG [Plugin] TextureRandomizer • sketchUcation • 1 but I’m afraid it will automatically turn your components into unique ones.

Try my extension
https://extensions.sketchup.com/extension/c568655c-a0b4-41b8-873e-ecd1bb2452cb/s4u-slice
or
https://extensions.sketchup.com/extension/fb2448a1-81a3-4601-96c4-8d4c332d2e13/s4u-multi-slice