Sub Groups in Layers
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Hello All,
I was wondering if there is a way to make sub groups within a Layer. I am thinking of this as a means to organize an interior building model. For example, each floor would be a layer, but inside that layer (floor) there would be rooms. And in the room (sub group) there may be furniture.
Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Ryan -
I don't think you understand layers in SketchUp quite as well as you should. Layers are only used to control visibility. They do nothing more than that. To do what you want, you would use nested groups or components. So your Outliner might look like this
-<First floor>
....-<Living room>
.........<Couch>
.........<Coffee table>
.........<Chair>
....-<Dining room>
.........<Table>
.........<Chair>
.........<Chair>
.........<Chair>
.........<Chair>
.........<Chair>
.........<Chair>
.........<Sideboard>And so on. the furniture for each room could be associated with a layer called "Furniture" and the each room could be associated with other layers. If you turn off the Furniture layer, all your furniture disappears and you have empty rooms. If you turn off the Living room layer, the Living room and all of its furniture would disappear. Of course if yo only have one furniture layer, all the rooms will be appear empty.
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Thank you Dave, that is exactly what I was thinking. I wanted it for visual purposes. I was not aware there was a nested layers, as this was the reason for my question. I am more comfortable modeling in Creator, which has s grouping system, as it is built on a hierarchy approach, which is accessible to the user.
Thanks for the help, I will look into this.
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Nesting is done by making a selection of components and/or groups and "wrapping them up as a component or group. Be careful with this, though. It's easy to get sloppy and I see that frequently in SketchUp models I get from students. Don't make the mistake of nesting raw, ungrouped geometry along with groups or components. This is a great way to make bad words come out of your mouth. Instead, make sure you make a component or a group of the raw geometry and make your nests from two or more components/groups.
I use an analogy of cling wrap for making a component or group. Your raw geometry is a sandwich. If you try to pick up your sandwich by only one corner, it falls apart. If you lay something like a big dill pickle on top of it, the pickle changes the sandwich (the sticky nature of loose geometry in SketchUp). If you wrap your sandwich in clear cling wrap you can still see the sandwich. If you pick it up by a corner, it remains intact. If you lay the pickle on it, the juice doesn't soak into the bread. The wrapped sandwich is a component/group.
If you take two wrapped sandwiches and wrap them up in another piece of cling wrap, you have a nested component/group. Don't wrap the first sandwich, build another on top of it and wrap the two together.
If you want to modify your sandwich to put mustard (apply a material in SketchUp) on it, you can put the mustard on the wrapper if you want but it's not the same as opening the wrapper and applying the mustard to the sandwich.
Now, think of layers as the cloaking device on a Romulan Bird of Prey. With the cloaking device turned on (the Visibility box un-ticked) you can't see the group or component but it is still there. Kind of a silly analogy but it works.
Make sure you keep Layer 0 active at all times. Keep all edges and faces on Layer 0. Only make layer associations for groups and components. The entities inside will stay on Layer 0. Not following that advice is another sure way to make bad words come out of your mouth.
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Thank you Dave, that is really good advice. This is somewhat similar to Creator, but a little different in the means of making the group and sub group. Your advice is very good. I have been doing most of this, but I didn't know I could wrap it all together to make the nested version.
Thanks again...
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