Ah yes, that makes sense. Great thinking.

Its extraordinary how much these little tricks can speed you up when you're processing file after file into working drawings.

Thanks for the help folks

Yeah it would be so cool - they dont even need to be very complex - you could automate a lot

I have a large file with many parts that I have turned into an excel BOM using SpaceDesign. I'm trying to make labels to stick on every part for easy identification but I can only find ways to make one of each label.

I'd love to be able to go
part 1 - 10 labels
part 2 - 8 labels

Based on the quantity of each item shown in the BOM
Word has an option to do this but it doesn't take into account the quantity of each label meaning you only get one of each and I need many of each.

Anyone had experience with this kind of thing?

Good points. I feel like I do a lot of "manual" work in layout that would be saved if there were some way of controlling this kind of thing.

Is there anyway to add functionality to Layout (like Ruby plugins in SU)?

Does anyone know of a workflow to send a Sketchup file to layout so that layout shows each scene on a new page?

I have my SU files fully setup for construction documentation but then I send to layout and have to copy and paste frames onto each page - would be much faster if you could get layout to display each scene on a different page automatically....

Have been waiting to try this plugin out for some time and just taking it for a first run in conjunction with Layout - really impressed

@unknownuser said:

what? it doesn't? you're saying you have a scene with the geometry blown up with the plugin and ;layout won't show it as blown up? share the model?

I think we might be missing each other's points. If I have geometry in unexploded position and create scene 1, it will register the geometry in the position. If I then explode that geometry and create scene 2 the geometry will now be registered in the exploded position. If I go back to scene 1 my geometry can switch back (if I've used the right plugins). But when I send that file to layout the geometry is in the same position for both scenes.

@unknownuser said:

but I use my model and then either pull it apart and save scenes

Yeah, I was hoping to avoid this

Both great tools, but layout doesn't recognize the geometry positions

Oh perhaps they do. I just haven't seen one that translates those positions to layout - layout seems to only be able to read on position of the geometry for each sketchup file.

Can you remember which plugins you had seen?

@unknownuser said:

there are a few exploded view type plugins... I forget the names.

Yeah I have used them, my problem is that layout doesn't seem to recognize their geometry positions unless I save a scene for every single position (like tweens from Keyframe Animation) which is super slow and confusing.

I just wondered if anyone had a more efficient hack for this

I'm currently working on a project for a kitset company doing some assembly instructions. They have previously just used jpegs from SU to show the parts of the kitset apart so that the user can understand how they fit together but this seems like a frustratingly slow way of doing things. Has anyone managed to do this kind of thing in layout showing parts in different positions based on SU scenes etc?

I tried this a long time ago with proper animation but layout couldn't recognize the animated part positions.

Any clever ideas are much appreciated

*support@renderplus.com?

Hey, the installer seems to detect SU2015 but when installation is complete I open SU and all I get is an option saying "SpaceDesign:Load". When I click this nothing happens. There is no option to turn on the Space Design toolbar and there seems to be no way to get SU2015 to recognize SpaceDesign using RBZ....

On windows 7 with SU2015?

Anyone else faced this/dealt with it?

I can't show you much because its under NDA but here is the first run with animated GIFs working in Twilight:

Thats on low animation settings and the GIF isn't working quite right

If I end up buying Lumion I think they should pay you a commission

Great explanation - I hadn't fully reconciled why games looked so good yet ray tracing took so long. Are there any other biased renderers that are good (not necessarily on par with Lumion) that don't case more than a new laptop?

This is not raytracing right? Its some other form of rendering?

Wondered about putting ice near it but that would probably just ingest water vapour

Question:
I just exported two video animations to 720p mp4 via Sketchup.

One was around 500 frames, was entirely in 2D and took 1 hour 30 mins to export
The other was around 1100 frames, was entirely 3D and took around 15 mins to export

what gives?

Currently melting my CPU as we speak - not sure what protection Windows offers for CPU core temperature but I hit 104 degrees celsius before HP coolsense said "sleep time".