Interchangeable components w/ pull-down?

tushar

I wish that components in SketchUp could behave more like families in Revit, where you can change the TYPE of a family after it has already been placed in the model. For example, lets say you have a component you've created called "One-person office" which is a 10' x 12' office with furniture layed-out for one person. You position 50 of these in your model to complete an office floor layout. After this is done, you decide that 20 of these offices actually need to be a "Two-person office". You create a new component, called "Two-person office" with the appropriate furniture, but rather than having to go in and delete 20 of your original offices and place the new component in their place, wouldn't it be great if you could just select the offices you want to change, and then change their "type" in a pull-down menu from "One-person office" to "Two-person office"?

Gaieus

Hi Tushar,

This is not very complicated in SU:

select the component instances you want to change
right click > Make unique (this will make each selected instance an instance of the new definition)
now right click on any of these "new" components and "Reload" (obviously with the already "pre-made" 2 person office).
Note that for this "reload" command you need to save the other unit previously as a simple skp file (not a component inserted into a file) after all, components are "mini skp files" embedded into our models.
The only things you have to pay attention are the location of the axes, the overall size and the rotation/alignment of the units.

plot-paris

and if you have SketchUp 7 Pro you can probably create a 'Dynamic Component' that lets you choose between different settings of one component (1-person office; 2-person office)...

Gaieus

That's true. For just one project however, I don't think it would be worth the hassle. But of course it's always so "convincing" in front of a client to show off with such a tricky solution