Solid Tools - Bugs/bad design
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I like solid tools, but I don't use it nearly as much I would like, because there are a few issues with the design. There are enough issues with it to make a list!
Operations on Solid Components
When you perform any solid operations on solid components, some annoying things happen:- a new component is created, and copies of the the old component do not change as one would expect. What you get is behaviour you would expect from a Group, not a Component
- the new component(s) that are created have a different name, different layers etc. It retains no attributes from the previous component, except its axes info.
General Operations
When you combine (OuterShell) two solids together, a new solid is created, but its axes are aligned to the World Axes, not the axes within the context you make the operation.I appreciate that these are not technically bugs, but poor design. It bugs me, because I think the way the tools work goes against the paradigm of Components/Groups, which is a fundamental part of Sketchup-thinking. As it is a core part of Sketchup, I expect something better.
Is it just me?
Workaround
Yes, there is a workaround - it's just not pretty enough for me:- Select the subject solid, and open it, so that you can select individual faces/edges.
- Select all the edge and face geometry, and group them.
- Get the second solid that is going to perform the operation, and put it next to the new group.
- Perform solid operations as usual.
- Explode the resulting solid.
This should leave you with the original names and layers, attributes etc.etc. in tact.
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Be sure that all items are components and then do
In the 1st select bad component then in the component window right click and replace
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Definitely one of my pet peeves. The renaming and moving to layer 0 of a component I have performed a solid operation on is a pain. After all, I have put an object on a specific layer for a purpose and I have given it a name for a purpose. Why does SU mess with my part like this. I would like to hear the logic around this. I think this is a case of the programmers coming to some decision which isn't based on producing work for the real world. Now, I am not maligning programmers since they do stuff which is far beyond my skill set, but there is a disconnect here.
KrisM -
Actually, when a component gets modified by a Solid Tool, the result becomes a group, not a component. Of course it's relationship to the other instances of the original component is broken and the rest aren't modified as you would expect. The new group gets named "Difference". If you have multiple entities that have been modified, they all wind up with the same name. Makes them difficult if not impossible to pick out of the list in Outliner. That and the layer thing have been the leading reasons why I rarely use Solid Tools. Unless the work involved in converting the group back to a component, renaming it and applying the definition to the other instances is less than using Intersect Faces or some other method of making the modification, I don't use them.
This isn't a bug. It's the way the tools were written. I had a very nice chat at 3D Basecamp with the author of the Solid Tools. I laid out my argument that what these tools do to components is entirely different than what any other tool would do when modifying the same components. He said he could see my point and would look into making the needed changes. I doubt we'll see them changed for SU2014 but maybe for SU2015. Let's keep our fingers crossed.
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@dave r said:
I had a very nice chat at 3D Basecamp with the author of the Solid Tools. I laid out my argument that what these tools do to components is entirely different than what any other tool would do when modifying the same components. He said he could see my point and would look into making the needed changes. I doubt we'll see them changed for SU2014 but maybe for SU2015. Let's keep our fingers crossed.
Thanks for representing at the Basecamp, Dave! I'm gonna have to go one of these years - sounds like a blast.
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I saw this comment by thomthom about another plugin but it seems pertinent to this conversation -
"I haven't used the tool, but common convention for tools is to create the entities they create within model.active_entities instead of model.entities. It also allows for the best flexibility. Since it is the convention with the native tools and pretty much all custom tools it is confusing if the geometry is created in a different context."
Seems to me that SolidTools clearly violates any conventions that are normally in force.
KrisM
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