Calculating external surface area

ashscott · 22 Aug 2012, 21:29

I need to calculate the surface area of some welded steel frames I have drawn in sketchup to calculate the cost of painting them - this means only the areas reachable with paint should be included.

I thought perhaps there might be a plugin that could throw some kind of mesh over a model and give a relatively precise idea of the area I am talking about.

Anyone know of anything or even have a workflow that could help me that is more efficient than selecting each face and going Context>Area>Selection and adding them up in a spreadsheet....?

thomthom · 23 Aug 2012, 07:00

Right click the material in the Material Browser and choose Area. Gives you the area of all the faces with that material.

ashscott · 23 Aug 2012, 20:53

@thomthom said:

Right click the material in the Material Browser and choose Area. Gives you the area of all the faces with that material.

Yeah that works well in a properly setup model. However, I have inherited these models from someone else. There was a plugin from SYCODE a while back that threw a mesh over a model for exporting the general shape to another CAD format - it didn't work that well but the idea of throwing a mesh over the model always struck me as a good way to do paint (surface area) calculations without accidentally including internal faces and faces that can't be reached for painting - they are out of sight or out of reach.

ashscott · 23 Aug 2012, 21:05

Here is a hacky kinda workaround:
1)install this plugin (removes inner faces): http://forums.sketchucation.com/download/file.php?id=14434
2)save the sketchup file you want to work on under a different name
3)explode all the groups out of the model
4)select all geometry in the model (Ctrl + A)
5)go plugins > remove inner faces
6)select all geometry again
7)context click > area > selection

Its not perfect but it has done the trick in my situation which had dozens of rolled hollow section beams intersecting each other.

Aerilius · 23 Aug 2012, 21:26

That sounds similar like Outer Shell (?)

ashscott · 23 Aug 2012, 23:17

Yes but I found outer shell a little glitchy (probably using it wrong) - the plugin mentioned above worked with no hassles.

pgarchnz · 7 Jul 2015, 03:04

I am trying to calculate the external surface area of a curved bridge form. I see in a post from 2012 is was possible to get the area of a particular material. Is it still possible to do this in SU 2015? as I cannot find the reference or dialogue to enable me to get it.

Is there a simple way to get this information.

Thanks in advance

ashscott · 7 Jul 2015, 04:59

Select a portion of the material in your model. Right click it and go Area > Material

It will display the area of that material in your current default units.

erikB · 7 Jul 2015, 07:49

There is a handy tool from fredo tools : report on areas.
It gives a nice report of all the areas in the file by material.
erikB

JQL · 7 Jul 2015, 10:53

@erikb said:

There is a handy tool from fredo tools : report on areas.
It gives a nice report of all the areas in the file by material.
erikB

Beware of that because it doesn't (didn't sometime ago at least) report the right area if you have hole cutting components.

Example:

wall material is 10m2;
insert a window as hole cutting component with 1m2;
wall material will still read 10m2 and not 9m2 as it should...

ashscott · 7 Jul 2015, 10:57

Yeah I made a terrific mistake calculating paint area on a construction job because the plugin I used was not behaving the way I expected. I can't remember which plugin it was

fredo6 · 8 Jul 2015, 08:47

@jql said:

@erikb said:

There is a handy tool from fredo tools : report on areas.
It gives a nice report of all the areas in the file by material.
erikB

Beware of that because it doesn't (didn't sometime ago at least) report the right area if you have hole cutting components.

Ooops! Completely forgot this case. Thanks for signaling.

I fixed it and will republish soon.

It will deduct the holes created by the glued components configured in Cut Opening mode

Fredo

JQL · 20 Jul 2015, 11:42

Hi Fredo, I didn't see this post until today. Sorry and thanks!

I believe this to be a game changer for the way we use Sketchup at our office from now on.

I can't thank you enough!

fredo6 · 20 Jul 2015, 13:28

@jql said:

I believe this to be a game changer for the way we use Sketchup at our office from now on.

I can't thank you enough!

Thanks to tell me if this is OK now.
Remember that the surface deduction is only done when the component is in Cut opening mode.

Fredo