Layout (LO) is used to display "Scenes" that you create in SU. When you change the model in SU e.g. make a room bigger then when you update the link to the SU model in LO the linked "Scenes" (paperspace/viewport) will update with the latest saved verion of the model so all your views can be updated together. No more forgetting to move the window on the elevation!

I have moved to SU Pro from ArchiCAD! ArchiCAD is a powerful piece of software and so it should be for the price, but SU is quite capable of competing in its own way depending on the work you are doing and how far along the learning curve you have travelled. The graphic results may not be as slick with all the automated hatching in AC but at the end of the day you just need to convey sufficient information for the builder to do his job.

If you want to show up AC, ask it to produce a simple 3D shape with bits cut out and others stuck on then freely move the object in 3D, you will find AC struggles to copy what you can do very easily in in SU.

SU allows a design to evolve, with AC the process is quite rigid, which is ok if the work you are doing needs that level of pre-defined automation.

@pbacot said:

It's been a while since I used this tool and it looks like interest in it has dropped off judging by the activity here. What other methods have people been using?

I recently discovered TIG's Hole Punching tool...
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=30846
which could work as a more efficient alternative depending on your components and objectives.

Thanks for the save tips especially TIG (Esc x2 ) and as ever CatchUp looks like a useful read!

Any chance we can download and save? A couple of times in this edition I've accidently clicked on an advert and ended up having to reload which seems to take forever.

Csaba, good tip, but I regularly hit "Delete Guides" to quickly clean up my drawing, can you stop the marks being deleted?

Interesting looking product which apparently owes a lot to SU. Shame they didn't learn from SU's marketing. I'm always suspicious of a company offering a product that doesn't publish it's prices, this usually results in regional rip offs and I won't touch software on a time limited licence which stops working at the end of the licence period; been there done that and lost a lot of valuable data because of it. As a consequence I won't even bother with the demo.

Some good tips there Joel!

@gullfo said:

it would be nice to have the reporting take families of groups and report directly though...

Glenn, I'm no Exel wiz but could you achieve what you need with a pivot table?

I hadn't realised until recently that if you set Model Info>Components>Fade rest of model to hide you can still edit a group/component, triple click to select all faces and then (rt-clk) "intersect with model" which you can then edit as required.

In some ways I prefer this over solid ops as it avoids creating a new group on layer zero .

I can see the argument from both sides for arc offsets because in the past I've wanted both results. Ideally SU will be given true arcs at some point. But from this thread I now understand why things are the way they are and on balance from an architectural perspective I prefer to have any offset from an arc create a consistent (wall) thickness which is what happens now rather than tapering the arc section to maintain a vertex offset.

Please can we have Generate Report CSV linked to the model units or at least give us a basic option of output in inches / centimetres. It's a real pain having to convert everything to metric just to do quick quantity checks.

Kingspan are a major player in the UK construction products market. They've been quietly buying up key sectors for a number of years and have been moving into the modern method of construction MMC a.k.a prefabrication and eco markets more recently. Not familiar with the product but should be a safe company to deal with.

You might also like to look at the http://www.zedfactory.com site for other eco innovations.

Well this turned into a surprising thread. I hadn't expected so many experienced users to be having issues with DCs. I guess someone needs to grab hold of this aspect of SU and give it a real good shake to give us a more useable format.

I did have another play yesterday to create an inclined beam and realised that DCs are really lacking some basic shape modelling commands such as add and subtract, but with SU's solid modelling this must now be a realistic prospect?

You could do it with just two scenes 1. sketchy & 2. solid. Simply hide the objects you don't want to appear in each scene then update it. Make sure you retain the same camera position for both scenes! You can then overlay the two images in a graphics prog or if you had pro in Layout.

I gave up already! DCs looked like a great parametric solution but even if I got one working it didn't make sense to me how they were deployed, seemingly creating random new components. If I spent time learning the rules then maybe I could make sense of it but for now I find it quicker just to modify my components on demand and build up a controlled static library of fixed size objects.

In my ideal world there would only be one master DC and that would be listed & enumerated according to its parameter variants, not as seems to happen where you end up with a proliferation of DCs.

Is that how you would build it in the real world?

One of the great things about SU is you can model as accurately as you need to. From what you want to do suggests in the real world the wall should either completely pass infront of the slab or it should be rebated to partly sit on and pass in front of the slab. You could hide the edges but that sounds like uneccessary work for an innaccurate representation of the construction.

If you need to move the shapes independently then you should group them before they connect. SU will automatically connect ungrouped faces/lines/shapes.

@fionmacool said:

Any thoughts?

If the objective is a basic library of industry standard (parametric) parts then great but if the objects are an attempt to duplication or replace parts of the specification then I fail to see a real benefit to the design process and the BIM data would best be ignored. The main purpose of drawings are to define the size, shape, location and assembly of the building parts. A complex BIM object will never correctly replace a properly written specification which would be a simpler and more reliable source of building information. They will never compete with the simple process of labelling a door [D-01] which can then be looked up in the specification with as much or as little information as necessary to define the product, quality of work, performance requirements and conditions under which the work is to be executed.

You might find it quicker and easier to create a reference point in the Sketchup model? I find it quite difficult in layout to lock onto undefined points.