ok, after having finally come up with what i thought was a working solution, i realized that there is yet another hurdle to making a true 3-D door out of a 2-D generic door. whether i use the "follow me" tool to create the entire frame at once, or just to create individual members of the door frame (which is necessary if i start w/ the 2-D generic door), small polygonal surfaces tend to go missing on the corner pieces. i already have a thread that addresses and provides a solution this problem HERE. it turns out that the reason small surfaces go missing near the intersections of planes is because SketchUp deems them too small to render. the best working solution to this is to scale up the model (say 100x) before i extrude the frame or the individual frame members. this way, the small surfaces that would otherwise be missing if drawn at regular scale are now large enough to get rendered when i extrude the frame or its individual members. then its as simple as scaling it back down to original size and i get no missing surfaces.
the problem with starting with a generic 2-D door (w/ the formulas already built into the attributes of its sub-components) is that it doesn't scale up the way i need it to in order to create my 3-D corners without missing geometry. more specifically, while i can change the width and height of the generic frame no problem, it is designed to maintain the same frame width regardless of the overall size of the frame. in other words, if i take a generic 10" x 10" frame and scale it up to 100x, i'll end up with a 1000" x 1000" frame, but the frame width will stay the same and not scale along with the overall size change. now while that's ultimately how i want my doors to work in their finished state, i need the generic 2-D door's frame width to scale along with the increase in overall frame width and/or height in order to draw my corners without missing surfaces. but in order to do that i have to change the formulas of the generic door, thus defeating the purpose of having a generic door with all the formulas already built into it.
on the plus side, i decided to remove the "door thickness" attribute from my model b/c it isn't even an available option for the line of cabinetry i'm currently working on. b/c of this, each frame sub-component no longer has to be broken down into a fixed depth group and a variable depth group (this was necessary to prevent the frame profile from stretching along with any changes in overall door depth/thickness). thus each frame sub-component consists of only "position" and "size" attributes, and no longer contains 2 sub-groups, each with their own "position" and "size" attributes. this decreases the number of attribute formulas per frame sub-component (and thus the number of cut-n-pastes i have to perform) from 18 to 6. door construction now takes approx. only 1/3 the time it took me before...so not having a generic door with the forumlas built in isn't so much of a drag anymore b/c i only have to do 1/3 of the cutting and pasting i was doing before.
in summary, the inability of the generic door to scale its frame width along with any changes in overall door width or height prevents me from using it without generating missing surfaces in my geometry. and changing the formulas of the generic door to accommodate frame width scaling (thus allowing me to draw corners without missing surfaces) defeats the purpose of using it to create multiple doorstyles with the attribute formulas already programmed into it.
