Make a scene for each component

tim

I can't spot any plugin that does this -

make a scene for each component
puts an instance of the component in the scene
names it something sensible

I guess it would be sensible to make it work for all selected components or all if nothing selected. I suggest the name might be something like component name + 'component scene'. It would probably be best to make a scene for unique instances and not multiple scenes merely because there are a gazillion instances around. I'm not sure what one ought to do with components containing other components; I think my initial suggestion would be to limit the scenes to the lowest level of component but I can see wanting to be able to have scenes of more complex items as well.

Such a plugin would make it really nice and simple to prepare for making a Layout doc that is intended to show each component separately for dimensioning etc.

I'm willing to try to write such a plugin myself if none exists but I warn you, I'll be asking lots of questions in that case

massimo

Maybe this one could be useful somehow?

ktkoh

Comp2Layer.rbYou might try this file:

places the component on its own layer Axx-component name where A is for assembly and xx is 01 thru 99 so layers stay sorted as created.
adds an instance out in space away from the assembly and creates a scene and if you have purchased jim's orhto views it will add the ortho views
the scene is just named the Axx to keep the tabs as small as possible

keith

tim

Thanks guys. I'l try both and see which one does it best for my purposes. In defence of my search-fu I'll just mention that comp2layer is not mentioned at all in the sticky list of plugins and view parts is only mentioned by title with no description whatsoever.

pilou

Maybe you can also use this sort of trick
Copy : Move your components or anything you want any time you want
Use this tricky plug by Rick Wilson Addpages

At the end you have a page by components

Take a look at my recent thread about that

BrooksL

I'll be interested in your findings, tim; that pluggin idea you mentioned sounds very useful!

tim

Well, I've tried both suggested plugins from above and neither of them really do anything much like I'd hoped for.

By way of explanation -

Viewparts actually functions as installed, which is good. What is bad is the way it seems to remove the selected components from your original page. They're not actually removed of course, just made hidden, seemingly as a side effect of the way the individual scenes are created. I suspect that should be simple to fix. I don't really like the 'extra' pages made with the whole selection and the 'initial' page. It might make some sense if you are only working in SU but I'm using LO and all we need is a page with each component. LO can handle the view orientation etc. I'm not at all sure about the whole 'excluding duplicate components' thing; why would you not want that? Is there any reason to have several pages of the same component created? Is there some SU thing I'm not aware of even after 7 years of use that makes it possible to have multiple copies of the 'same component' that are not actually the same? And the code; well I'm not a fan of Ruby's syntax or semantics to be honest, it's a very poor imitation of Smalltalk with lots of annoying cruft from C++ etc thrown in. I wish they'd used Smalltalk for a script language…
Comp2Layer didn't actually appear to work at all initially. It seems to try to install a context menu only - no menubar item - and that simply wouldn't appear for me. I fudged it to add a menubar entry and was able to try it out. The context menu related code appeared to be similar to that which works in some other plugins, so no idea what was going wrongI didn't much like what it did; moving the selected component to a new layer is all very well but the damn new layer ought to be set to visible in the original page! If you select several components they all get moved to the same new layer which appears to be named by the first component in the selection. The copy of the component (only the first selected one) is added off some distance but within the same group/component that it came from, thus making for an odd selection box.
I think the approach taken by viewports has a better chance of being useful, simply making a new scene where everything except the component is invisible seems like it must be as minimal as it gets. At least it doesn't have to disrupt the original drawing(s). I think I'll see if I can improve on the idea.
I would be interested in any answers to my question about the duplicate components (above). I don't get that yet.

tim

@unknownuser said:

I think the approach taken by viewports has a better chance of being useful, simply making a new scene where everything except the component is invisible seems like it must be as minimal as it gets. At least it doesn't have to disrupt the original drawing(s).

Sigh. Except of course there is the immense fun that the component/hidden rules cause when you have nested components. Since nested components seems like a really good idea in general it is quite important to handle them well. A pointer to a good explanation of those rules would be interesting.

ViewParts hides components and thus we can very easily end up with everything hidden, everywhere. I think that is probably not going to help make parts drawings in LO! Thus I guess we have to adopt some of the idea from Comp2Layer in building a layer for the chosen component(s) and making that layer invisible everywhere except in the scene(s) where we want it. The obvious question is whether it is more effective to

make a single layer, put copy of each component on it and then make a scene for each components where
a) that layer is the only one visible
b) all other components on the layer are made hidden.
or make a separate layer for each component and a separate seen for each.
I can't recall seeing anything that might explain which is more efficient should the list of components get really big. Imagine the guy that does models of oil refineries choosing all the bolts and asking for component scenes for them!

TIG

http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?p=345933#p345933
View-Parts >> a Scene tab per 'part'...

tim

@tig said:

http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?p=345933#p345933
View-Parts >> a Scene tab per 'part'...

Err, yah, read that, got the plugin. As mentioned in those comments it simply doesn't work sensibly if you have components nested. And I don't mean it 'fails to make scenes for inner components' - I didn't expect it to do that. If you open a component with other components nested within, select one or more and use view-parts you gets load of empty scenes and your original scene is emptied of the chosen components as well.

Copying the component you want to work with doesn't improve things much either. It also doesn't play well with layers. Copying the component, moving it to Layer0 and exploding it at least appears to do something sensible, which is a start. I think the plugin needs to do a whole lot more than it currently does.

There's also the issue of what a duplicate component actually is; simply having the same definition name doesn't seem to mean much when some might be flipped - for the purposes of doing component drawings in LO that is not a duplicate because you will almost certainly want to have a separate drawing to make sure you get two pairs of table legs suitably mirrored and not four identical ones! Simple rotating or translating transforms do not matter here, but any sort of scaling would. Has anyone already written a snippet that does such a compare? I've noted comments about the actual transforms not being identical across copies of the same component so we would need to compare the actual transform values.

tim

My first version of an attempt at solving this is http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=45790