Creating 'independent' components
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Hi,
I'm very new to Sketchup and have been learning by following the tutorials given in 'Drafting and Design for Woodwoorkers'. I think my problem is pretty simple, but have struggled to articulate due to my unfamiliarity with the correct terminology. To help you help me I have produced a short video of the problem that I am encountering (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw9EHyYyP4g). Hopefully, alongside the explanation I am about to give, someone will understand what I'm getting at.
In short, I want to create 3 solid and independent components: two legs, with an apron between them (the project is one side of a small table). When I say independent what I mean is that moving one component won't affect the other two. However if you look at the video (or just skip to 1:04) you can see that when I move the apron, not only is the end of the apron 'hollow', but I am also left with two 'holes' in the legs where the apron was previously. Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong?
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You are not doing anything 'wrong'.
It's just doing what you tell it to do!
You are making the two legs and the rail connected geometry and then separating then into components by selecting parts. The ends of the rails are therefore cut out as they are now part of the rail component and a hole is left in the legs. Of course you could now draw an edge back in to the leg and heal the hole and erase the unwanted edges, then make the leg into a component...
However, the clever way to do it without any later 'repairing; is this...
Make a leg in place in the model.
Make all of its geometry a component.
Copy that leg for times into the locations the legs will be.
Now later if we adjust one leg the rest will adjust too.
Now make a rail in place in the model.
Make all of its geometry a component.
Nothing is now 'sticking' to the legs so all of it remains 'independent'.
Again copy the rail into place around the table.
If it's not a square you only need two rails and you make another rail for the other two sides.
Let's say you want to add tenons to the ends of the rails...
Edit a rail [double-click it] and draw lines in the ends, PushPull the tenon as desired.
If you can't see what you are doing use the View>Component-Edit>Hide-Rest-Of-Model toggle so you can - sometimes it's useful not to have other stuff in the way but sometimes it's useful to see other stuff to snap to...
You only need to add the tenons to the ends of one of the rail components the other updates to match.
Exit the edit.
Now all rails have tenons.
Let's add the mortises in the legs.
Edit the leg - this time 'select-all' and right-click context-menu 'intersect with model'.
The outlines of the rails/tenons are added to the leg.
Toggle the rail off so you can see this.
PushPull the two mortises.
Erase any unwanted lines - e.g. where the outermost edges of the rails touched the leg
Exit the edit.
Now you will find that some components will be the wrong way round - unimportant until we added mortises etc and they were no longer symmetrical,
This is easily fixed select an incorrect leg [or rail if the tenon is 'off-center'], use the rotate tool to correct its orientation, if it needs to be 'handed' you can use the 'flip' options in the context-menu or Scale with -1; you might now need to Move the parts back into their correct locations.
Now you have a table made from one leg and one or two rails.
The power of components is that editing one edits all - so adding chamfers to an edge a the leg will repeat in all of its instances...
Hope this helps......... -
In addition to TIG's description, perhaps the video here would help, too. It isn't meant as a step by step basic tutorial but you can see the process I use to draw a table or any other piece of furniture.
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