I am getting close to finishing my wooden extension to a container so that I can store wood and metal stock under it. When I transfer this over to layout, I don’t want to transfer the whole thing. Instead, I want to be able to dimension each component separately, because each will have mounting holes etc. How would I go about doing this? For example, can I create separate scenes, each scene containing just one component and transfer only the scene to layout?
You could use the timber frame extensions and ‘Make Shop Drawing’:
This will allow you to extract each piece to a separate SKP file and bring them into LO for dimensioning. Here its a screenshot of a current timber frame project I am working on. I think the new version has some options for batch exporting the pieces to LO files.
You can also do this manually by creating a separate SKP file with all the various parts that you can then detail in LO:
Your design doesn’t look like it will stand up to a strong wind or any snow (if you get any). I’m not sure if you have someone that can look this over locally to help with the sizing of the members and connections between them but it might be good to do that before you go too far.
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Thanks for the tip. I don’t have any way of doing stress analysis on this. Used 4x9 cm pine posts everywhere and 1.5 cm thick OSB on the top. The entire structure will be between a large wall (not visible above) and the container. I will use 22 mm threaded rod, fixed into a drilled hole on the ground rock with chemical anchor. 60x60x6 mm L brackets will be mounted to the 22 mm threaded rod. For mounting the wood parts, I will use M10 threaded rod and bolts throughout. It will have to do. And it will a one man job, that’s why I designed in it segments. There is one core segment, duplicated 4 times, and an end segment. One segment can be done by one man (me).
From the point of view of the model and the shop drawings you’ll want for this project, this is similar to the furniture shop drawings I make. I prefer to keep all of the components in a single .skp file. It makes it much less work to manage potential changes if the come. If there are dimension changes, for example, I make them in the complete assembly knowing that those changes will propagate to the other intances of the components automatically. No finding and updating auxilliary .skp files.
My models look something like this. I drag out copies of the components and arrange them out of the way of the other views of the model.
I create a single Parallel Projection scene showing all of the components.
There are rotated copies of the components to generate 2-views. If I need a 3-view, a third copy is created and rotated but most of the time I find two is enough.
In LayOut I make as many copies of the viewport as needed for the parts I need to show. The arrangement of those parts in the scene in the model has little to do with the way they are laid out on the page. I drag the edges of the viewport to crop it showing only the component I’m interested in for the view. All of the viewports shown selected here are generated from the single scene shown above.
LayOut will dimension across multiple viewports so when I have long parts I crop the viewports and add break lines. For hidden features such as mortise or other joinery, I stack viewports on separate layers. The viewport(s) on the bottom layers have a Wireframe style applied and dashes applied to the tag.
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Good luck. From what I see I would be concerned about wind / snow / and how strong it will be on those thin / skinny legs.