I think for areas, the easiest way to do what i want is to assign materials and then just right-click the material in the materials-window and get the area this way.

I dont know about length tho. Ideally, i would like to just draw lines on a layer, and then have SU sum up the lengths of all the lines on this specific layer. What would also be nice, if i could somehow highlight the all the lines on this layer, to visually check if i didnt forget any parts in the model. Anyone knows how to do this?

Regards,
Andy

Beginner: thanks for the tip. I have tried the BimUp5D plugin today. I am not sure if i am just not getting it and i dont understand the workflow, or if its just not suitable for my use-case.

For example, i have a building, and i want to calculate the area of the external wall-surface. If i understand this right, i have to make a component for every single face of the wall - since BimUp does not support area calculations for components with multiple faces. Then, i have to right-click every single face and use 'Define Area' on it manually.

Besides from this being tedious, I think its also quite a error-prone process - there is no way i can see i can visually check if i forgot a face. In my opinion this is not a reasonable process for more complex cases with multiple hundreds of faces.

Then i tried to calculate the building perimeter of a L-shape. Apparently it can do length and width, but i see no way to get the perimeter.

If you have any tips, id appreciate it.

unearthed: thanks for the link, i will check out component reporter. I have updated my profile.

Hi,

i have to compile a quantity survey of a building. Up to now i always used AutoCad + Excel and did this manually. This project however is way bigger and of more complex geometry (although all orthogonal) that i think it would be more efficient and less error-prone if i would model it in 3d and generate reports from that.

Here is what i have in mind exactly: i am only interested in the exterior parts of the building (walls, doors, windows, roofs etc.). The elements would have to have certain attributes, for example 'type of wall', orientation, dimension and type of doors and windows and so on. Then i would like to extract information out of the model, for example things like: area of all walls with orientation south, or number of windows of type x with dimension y that are located in a wall of type z with orientation north. Are there plugins that could help with things like that?

Is anyone using SketchUp for things like this? Do you think it is the right tool for this task?

Any hints appreciated,

Andy

Hello,

is it somehow possible to disable shadow-casting for a specific group only? For example, i want to put some trees on a scene, but i dont want to cast any shadows from them - while other geometry should still cast shadows. Is this possible?

Best regards,
Andy

Thanks Gaieus, got it.

@gaieus said:

Hi Andy,

Create a 3rd layer for the top face of the ground floor walls. Now open that group, double click on the top face and copy it on the clipboard (Ctrl+C). While that top face+its bounding edges are still selected, right click and hide.
Now close the group and paste the copied top face in place (Edit menu). Make it a group, too, and set the visibility to be ONLY visible in Scene 1 (with groundfloor) while hidden in Scene 2 (with second floor, too).

Now open the second floor group, too, double click on its bottom face and hide that, too.

See attached file for ideas...

Hello,

following problem: suppose i model a simple 2-story house. I want to create 2 scenes, one where the upper story is turned off so i can look into the ground floor, and one scene with the complete house visible.

So i put the ground-floor in one group and seperate layer, and the upper-story in a seperate group and layer, and turn the visiblity of the upper-floor off to create the first scene. But when i turn on the upper story layer to view the complete house, i get an edge between ground and upper floor, since they are on seperate groups. How can i get rid of this edge, and still preserve the 2 distinct groups?

Best regards,
Andy