Basic help - dynamic component
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Hello.
I've been using Sketchup for quite some time. I'm certainly not an expert but not a total newbie either
At the moment I'm making dynamic components for helping me drawing pipelines (containing straight pipes, bends, t-junctions, flanges, valves etc). I'm having trouble to get my dynamic component for a reducer to work correctly. I cannot get the second smaller circle to draw. It feels like I'm missing something trivial but I cannot figure out how to solve this problem. I've tried to divide the reducer component into two child components, one which is the larger circle and one which is the smaller circle. The circles draw fine but I cannot connect the two circles together.
See the attached dynamic component. Can someone give me a hint which direction to go? I guess one way is to write a plugin in Ruby. But I'm not familiar with Ruby and I quite like dynamic componets, they are fairly simple to make.
Is there something easy I'm missing???
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I can't think of an easy way to do it - at least not without creating a fairly complex DC using sub-components and/or triangles or parallelograms - which I think would make the component unnecessarily heavy.
As you note, DC's can not create geomtetry such as for connecting the ends of the reducer.
One ready-made solution that may work for you is the Engineering Toolbox plugin and website.
Another solution may be a library called parametric.rb written by Google - it allows fairly simple parameterization of geometry. So if you can write a Ruby plugin to draw a single object, then making it parametric is fairly easy using the library. The library provides a right-click menu to edit the parameters of the object using a dialog box.
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Jim - thank you very much for your answer.
Yes, it seems like I have to dig into Ruby programing, hmm, too bad.
If anybody else have another opinion, please feel free to give me a hint
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