Suspended Ceiling face around light components

[dahovey]

Hi everyone. I am fairly new to Sketchup and am running into some things I can't figure out.

I was trying to make a suspended gypsum board ceiling with recessed lights.
The light components contained "faces" or components themselves that emitted light for a rendering program.

The problem was I created a separate component for the ceiling itself. The emitting part of the light didn't work then because the face of the ceiling blocked the light.

In this case it seems best to have separate components for light and ceiling. Otherwise I would be exploding both the light and the ceiling. When they are "glued" together then I could delete the intersecting face at the light.

What is the best way to go about this??

Any help is appreciated.

[shura]

Hello David and welcome

That is indeed a bit confusing - happened to me too. Components that have the ability to automatically cut openings seem to work only on ungrouped geometry, and only when they are placed on the already existing wall/ceiling. Don't explode anything, just place new lights into the ceiling group/component while editing it. You could as well cut the openings in the same manner if you don't want your lights to be nested inside other groups or components. Even simpler is it to leave the ceiling ungrouped if possible.
(could be that there are even better methods)

[Gaieus]

Yes, gluing/cutting components can only cut holes on raw geometry, not on groups/components (but of course, they should be able to cut that holeon the raw geometry inside a group/component) as Shura says.

Once a component lost its ability to cut a hole (or has been unglued), it cannot retain this ability any longer with native SU tools however. Now we have a nifty plugin, "Superglue " by Thomthom that will re-glue (and cut) these components.

YouTube - Superglue Plugin for SketchUp by ThomThom
[flash=480,385:ba83iujs]http://www.youtube.com/v/VS8-tjYTPXM?fs=1&hl=en_US[/flash:ba83iujs]