In case you want to move it or make changes later?

Glad you like it

Far out - this is really cool. Dan's helpfulness has been amazing and he is such a straight-forward guy to deal with. Glad to see the community really looking out for each other.

Hey thanks Emerald - the discussion regarding the folding door really helped.

For anyone else struggling with this:

1. Record position for the first piece (the parent component)
2. Open the parent component and moved the nested component to its required position
3. Record that position
4. Close the parent component

The capacity for keyframe animation to relate its coordinate systems to a parent component system rather than the coordinate system of the model as a whole makes this plugin significantly more powerful than other animation tools I've used

Simfonia has a small part of it that handles physics simulations called "Bullet" physics which I would say has about one tenth of the power for physical simulations that SP has. Simfonia has a lot of other things but SP is an entirely different beast - an awesome one at that.
PS - I have a paid Simfonia license and love it

I'm enjoying your plugin, you've obviously put some serious work into development.

I was wondering if you have a solution to the problem of rotation axes moving during an animation if they are part of a second rotation?

My example of this is on an excavator's boom - the first part of the boom rotates seamlessly but if I rotate the second part of the boom (called the stick) at the same time as rotating the first part - the rotation axes is not interpolated properly (regardless of how/where I set the group's origin/axis)

Here is an attempt to show the problem in a GIF

Note how the second portion of the boom doesn't stay synchronized with its pin nor stay aligned with it's ram mounting on the top - any suggestions?

We had a thread on this some time back - it wasn't conclusive but it helped me: http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=80&t=41696

Kickstarter could be cool - would require the people that know the code to get on board though - even if they allow running of fundraising initiatives to be delegated to us, we still need them to code it.

What do you think Chris? - Several free versions of SP up to 3 point whatever and then a robust, powerful paid version 4.0?

I'd certainly buy it and I would be happy to put administrative work into making it happen

@unknownuser said:

But it does a lot.

You're saying that this space design plugin from renderplus can interpret geometry that has been drawn crooked with the group/components axis not aligned?

I see what you mean - my workaround was check the last autosave time and hope I saved it not too far before I began editing the components - that workaround failed me many times

Yeah I have to agree, I don't think I've seen a tool in any piece of software that lets you model hap-hazzardly and then reports accurately later - if you want an accurate report of what is in your model then you will have to align all the axes appropriately....

I'm willing to be surprised though

@unknownuser said:

You mean now I can stop copy, undo, undo, undo, undo, undo, undo, undo, undo, undo, undo, undo, undo, paste in place...? awesome possum!

Not sure what workflow you've been using but it sounds like this plugin is just what you need...

Even if that video was in English it would still seem a little hard to understand.

If you use cutlist or tig's component reporter, make sure that the axis of each individual component/group in your model lines up in the direction that you want that item measured. Those tools will only measure in the directions of the axis.

Glad you like it

Hey, you gotta pay for good work

The final product and discussion is now available over here: http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=54082

This is a plugin I shared the idea for some time ago here: http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=180%26amp;t=50800

I didn't have the coding skills to make it happen but I really felt that, to use sketchup's component system to its full potential, without being afraid of editing stuff accidentally, this plugin was a must have.

So I forked out some cash and got Dan Rathburn to code it up (I think he did a great job by the way). It gives you a webdialog notification whenever more than one component is being edited and tells you exactly how many components are being edited.

You can ignore the webdialog and go on editing the components or you might realize that you don't want to edit all those components at once and, as a result, make some unique and begin editing again - in only a few weeks of use it has saved me a lot of headaches and sped up my workflow greatly as I'm now not afraid to use components to their full potential.

There's no reason why I should get all the benefit so here it is for you to enjoy.
Updated version 2.4.0

PM me if you find any issues...

The latest edition should be available from the PluginStore http://sketchucation.com/pluginstore?pln=CoastalConcepts_EditFlag

CoastalConcepts_EditFlag_v2.4.0.rbz

Have you tried Cutlist?: http://lumberjocks.com/daltxguy/blog/5143

Hi all,

We got this plugin up and running in a really functional way.

EditFlag

It has improved my workflow in SU immensely as I can now work with multiple component instances (using components to their full potential) without the fear of editing a bunch of components accidentally.

Would love your feedback and any bug reports on this.

Big shoutout to Dan Rathburn - He coded this and I highly recommend his work.

I'm trying to modify Dan's script to make this a little more lightweight and to see if I can make a UI.messagebox appear whenever I'm editing multiple components as I seem to not notice the current notification in its current form.

First thing, can't we chop out anything referring to groups as groups won't modify other groups that are derived from them? Like this:

if inst.is_a?(Sketchup;;Group)
            parent = inst.entities.parent
            num = parent.count_instances
            text = "Editing #{num} group instances"
            puts(text) if debug

That would also save the editpath query thingamajig from having a second "if" function in it (I think)

Also, in order to get the UI.messagebox I'm trying to add in something like this:

      parent = inst.definition
            num = parent.count_instances
            puts {UI.messagebox("Editing #{num} component instances")} if debug

But that keeps breaking the script....

I feel like this should be really simple and it probably is - can someone point out how I'm misusing UI.messagebox?