Find Identical Components

Bg1137

Does anyone know how to identify components that are exactly the same and combine them? I have a model with 1000s of components, but many are exact copies of eachother. At one point they were made unique but I would like them to be connected again. Is there an extension out there that can do this?

Dave R

In the Components browser right click on the component you want to replace and click Select Instances. Then right click on the one you want to replace them with and choose Replace Selected.

juju

@dave r said:

In the Components browser right click on the component you want to replace and click Select Instances. Then right click on the one you want to replace them with and choose Replace Selected.

Thanks for the process, very useful and many people do not know it.

I think the OP has the problem that there are 1000's of identical components, but they are identified separately, he needs something that would search them out and replace them (not manually) so that they would be instances of the same component. That is what I read anyway.

slbaumgartner

@juju that's how I read it also. I can't remember now whether it was an external program that didn't support the idea of components or an automated task within SketchUp, but I've seen models that were constructed with a great many physically identical objects that were not in any way recognized as having anything to do with each other. Maybe from something that creates steel frameworks?

Anyway, I think the process @DaveR suggested will be quite tedious in that case because SketchUp provides no mechanism to recognize such situations. The user would have to go through the model and select each such. It could in principle be coded, but it would probably be pretty slow and prone to missing some objects due to computer arithmetic effects.

Dave R

Yes, it could be slow if each of the 1000 components is unique although they could all be selected quickly if they were isolated from the rest of the model with proper use of tags/layers, then they could all be replaced in one step with Replace Selected.