Assembly to 2d sketch workflow

cdubea

Hi all,

I'm not really a newbie, but have what I feel like must be a newbie question. My background includes many years of SolidWorks solid modeling, but I like the simplicity that SketchUp brings without the overhead of a fully developed tool like SolidWorks. I use it to do home woodworking projects and stuff almost exclusively now.

I've got a design worked out for a folding workbench which is multiple parts that I'm ready to get some dimensions on for fabrication. In SolidWorks, I can open each part separately and create a drawing for fabrication.

Now I realize that SketchUp doesn't work that way with separate files for parts and drawings, so my question is.. How do I get each individual part in a design arranged where I can create suitable dimensions so I can build them?

Thanks,

chris

remus

When i've had to do this , i just did it by making sure everything was in groups/components and then dimensioning it up. I thne moved the component/group away from the main model, dimensioned it up and turned on parallel projection mode. I found this works quite ell if you just need rough and ready plans that arent too scale.

If you want your drawings to scale, your bet bet would probably be to export your models to something else. Layout is OK for this, if youve got it and a bit of time to play around with it.

Hopefully somebody whos done a lot of this wil come along and explain a better way of doing this, as neither methods i explained are particularly elegant.

Rob D

Chris

Make sure all parts of your drawing are created as components. Go to window "outliner" and click on each component and "save as". You can then open each of these files individually to dimension them.

A further tip. If you want to dimension orthographic views, it's best to export views as dwg/dxf and reimport so that your dimension leaders snap correctly. There's a ruby somewhere which does orthographic views automatically.

regards
Rob

Jean Lemire

Hi Chris, hi folks.

You can use scenes to focus on each part. You can even print the scenes to scale if you use standard views (top, face, back, right, left, bottom) and disable perspective.

See attached SU file for ideas.

Dimensions.skp

cdubea

@rob d said:

Chris

Make sure all parts of your drawing are created as components. Go to window "outliner" and click on each component and "save as". You can then open each of these files individually to dimension them.

A further tip. If you want to dimension orthographic views, it's best to export views as dwg/dxf and reimport so that your dimension leaders snap correctly. There's a ruby somewhere which does orthographic views automatically.

regards
Rob

This is essentially what I wound up doing. I augment this with the xref ruby that allows you to mark each component as an 'xref' for update and such. This way I can modify the components and then have them updated in the top level file. A lot like SolidWorks does, but not quite so straightforward.

I'll look for the orthographic ruby. That sounds handy.

Thanks to all

cdubea

@jean lemire said:

Hi Chris, hi folks.

You can use scenes to focus on each part. You can even print the scenes to scale if you use standard views (top, face, back, right, left, bottom) and disable perspective.

See attached SU file for ideas.

Thanks this is helpful.

Rob D

Chris

Thanks for the hint on using the xref ruby. I hadn't realised you could xref components with it too. That's made my day!

cdubea

@rob d said:

Chris

Thanks for the hint on using the xref ruby. I hadn't realised you could xref components with it too. That's made my day!

Well don't get too ecstatic. The tool is sort of broken. If you have a file with components which themselves are made of components you have to be careful. If you modify a component several 'layers' down and then open the top most file, the xref manager will want to update that component and it's parent component. Unfortunately this will send the ruby and Sketchup off into never-never land as it is evidently a circular reference.

I've asked TIG (the author) to modify the xref ruby to only show the components inserted directly in the file (not any of the 'children') but he has failed to respond.

You can work around this by setting the update on all the lower level child components to OK in the manager and only updating the highest level children.

In SolidWorks we call these parts and assemblies, but since that nomenclature is not present in Sketchup, I'm attempting to adapt ;>

I posted a file in the xref ruby discussion area. You can download it and see what I'm driving at. Perhaps if more people poke TIG he will fix the script.

Have fun,

chris