Ok guys & gals and all you out there. I like to come here as often as the next person looking for assistance and ranting about weird things that Sketchup just can’t to seem to get right, like limited importing options, very limited exporting options, and our favorite love-hate-child “Layout”. But I just realized something that Sketchup CAN do that is just freakin’ AWESOME - it’s a feature I have not seen anybody talk about because it’s essentially not visible but it just saved me hours once again. And I am talking about Copy/Paste.
Ok - copy/paste doesn’t seem like that revolutionary but have you ever dug into HOW Sketchup does that? It’s like - MAGIC.
I have this really big “Master” file where we develop product variations of boats. It’s a very tidy file. Everything is well sorted into components and all the materials are correctly named, tag structure etc. Don’t you EVER mess with my master file!
From this file we copy stuff into work-files - it’s a one way street.
Last week a colleague made a mistake and developed a rather complex new product variation that was partially based on said components in a completely different file. The results were good but everything was set up differently in a different file and adding all this back into master would be a major pain. Finally I decided to just do it and then sort through all the problems and double-components using our trusty “component replacer” Plugin. We are talking hundreds of sub-components here. So here I am, doing the copy, doing the paste, my coffee ready for a couple of hours of mindless work, when I realize - no need - Sketchup somehow figured out which components are actually similar enough in name and structure to be considered the same and merged them in the file while pasting.
This is insanely nice! And it happens in the background without the user ever needing to think about it. Imagine the script that must be running in the background comparing hundreds and hundreds of subcomponents AND Materials agains the file it copies, and swapping what can be swapped all triggered by a simple “cmd+v”
So - hats off to whoever came up with this - it’s a bit of magic. Thank you!
