Your client looks at it and decides s/he wants one element changed, It needs to be a different size and it needs to be moved a couple inches away!!!
Unfortunately, you’ve been very careful to make sure that everything is properly snapped to its adjacent member; all objects grouped and some of those objects helpfully grouped again, shelf components have been created; and though it initially seemed that only one element has to be changed (the end of a cabinet) it turns out that both ends of the cabinet need to be changed and all the planks in between, and their reinforcement members, need to be slightly resized and resnapped into place.
IN GENERAL, WHAT IS THE PROPER STRATEGY TO USE TO ACCOMPLISH A RECONSTRUCTION LIKE THIS?
Is it to select the affected parts, choose “Edit Group”, and go on from there?
Is it to select the affected parts, choose “Explode”, and go on from there?
Is it to select EVERYTHING, and choose “Edit Group” or “Explode” and go on from there?
Is it to do any of the selections and repeatedly choose “Edit Group” or “Explode” until nothing is a group or part of a group.
More specifically, a problem I keep on having to face is that if I choose two parts that were grouped and either Edit or Explode them (repeatedly, if need be) that every time I choose one of those objects with the intent of extruding or moving it that the other object I want to relate to the first one disappears.and so I have no place to move/extrude it to.
One of the most used shortcuts I use is ‘Hide rest of model’ It is a ‘Model Info’ setting and can be found here:
[menu] Window > Model Info > Components:
You refer to components but later to exploding Groups.
It sounds like you have a number of elements that repeat, such as shelves and reinforcement, maybe even the end pieces. If they have been made as Components, you only need alter one of each. You may have to move some if the shelves get longer, but that’s easy enough.
I think you post neatly demonstrates how difficult it is to advise without including the drawing itself. We have to guess whether you mean “components” in the general sense or “Components” in the technical SU sense.
If your drawing is properly constructed, the amendment you describe should be done in moments.
I would leave most components and edit each component. For a cabinet the box is one component and I could enter it and move one end to make it longer etc. The shelves are likely copies of one component, and i can edit one and making it longer, all the others would update too. It actually is an aid that everything is already compartmentalized and in the right place when you have to do some changes.
I won’t say proper or improper, but I rarely explode something. I either fix it or throw it away. Exploding will put the edges and faces on the layer that the component is on, and if that is some other layer than Layer0 it can create problems for me. Sometimes I explode a component inside another so I can combine the elements.
Try not to make unnecessary (deep) nesting of components and think about how you compose the components, so when you go into a component you made last year, you know what to expect in terms of organization. (at least that’s what I would like to do )
I don’t know why your parts are disappearing, but It may have to do with the setting under “View” / “Component edit”, as mentioned above. Sometimes you need to make some guides to target your changes.
Select all your components and group them. Then use the Scale Tool and select the group, select to center nodes at the end and compress slightly, release an type 48" and the group will then be 48" long instead of the 55" Then shift as necessary to get in the right position
Charles. This may definitely work for small changes to “look” OK. But I would worry that the frames, handles and other details would be scaled incorrectly. If you have a 48" long cabinet made 125% longer, the stiles will end up 125% wider whereas you had designed to be 1 1/2" wide stiles exactly (they would end up about 1 7/8" wide). Round knobs would become ovoid. That’s why I would edit the cabinet box component and select the end panel and stile geometry and move it.
(It can be quite a number of steps, the more components you have, and that’s why some people use cabinetry plugins. For my work the above method is faster than buying and learning software that may or may not fit my purpose.)
This is also why it may be a good idea to make “massing” models to get the cabinet sizes right before adding detail.
You simply double click on a group (same as edit group), and make edits. If there is another group in there, edit it too but do not explode. Then move on to the next (adjacent) cabinet group and adjust each. You just gotta do it.
If you used components correctly, then this should result in some shortcuts, like cabinet shelves resizing concurrently, and the like.
O com’n now my friend! No, it wasn’t Diane.It was a hypothetical. Truth be told, neither of us liked the original design, especially me. And by this time we’d torn the kitchen apart. It wasn’t until a ‘clean mind’ was able to look at it (her son) and suggest the obvious (switch the fridge with the cabinet!) that we both realized that was the kingpin move that could point to a great solution to the whole problem.
More to the SketchUp point, it wasn’t until a carpenter friend of mine and myself took our SketchUp drawing and confronted the actual space that I realized (as an artist, I’ve known this for years, but never had it demonstrated so severely and practically) that PERSPECTIVE IS AN ILLUSION and that having to deal with a drawing–even one with dimensions–in perspective was an incredibly difficult way to translate a drawing into actual planks of wood. (My carpenter friend had just finished having to count floorboards (whose width he knew) on a photograph someone had sent him in order to get some sort of dimensional idea of a job he’d been asked to do.)
Thanks, this is very useful to know (though it may now be difficult to implement) I just discovered (I say discovered because so many videos say, point blank, that you can’t resize. and may as well just, restart objects) that you can add or decrease, by dimension, an extrude.
When you say compress do you imply decompress (opposite direction) if you want to increase the size?
And does it increase/decrease the size by adding/decreasing length to the end you ‘compressed’ or does it do that by lengthening/delengthening both ends one half the distance?
It’s not an admission. Its common practice with sketchup too. That’s why we have parallel projection and a way to quickly hop to standard views like: top, front, left, right, and back. Used together you can quickly make elevation views with dimensions that a carpenter can use effectively. This is where Layout really shines.
I refer to components because the Group-like functions SketchIt supports are Groups and Components.
I carefully labeled and structured my drawing in the Outliner just so that I would have an orderly way to understand my drawing “years from now”. Similar like I would do in a traditional CAD program with layers. But this seems to have come back to bite me…
Parallel projection, in no way allows one to view or manipulate a drawing in the way a builder or carpenter is used to. (Please correct me if you think I’m wrong.)
I’d been looking forward to trying Layout hoping-against-hope that it would somehow bridge the gap between seeing a scene the way builders need to look at it and being amazed at how it looks in SketchUp. But I spent my whole month with Pro and never got to Layout. And I’m not sure that I’m allowed to use Layout for Make.
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