In part, I agree. However IFC has been gaining ground for a while. Sure it's not perfect, most data translation isn't. However I don't buy the argument that says, "Companies have a vested interest in the status quo, so why bother?"

The common solution is here already. It's IFC. Other companies have invested in it and it definitely works - at least in part. The ability to create proper reports and exchange data with other disciplines using the easiest (and most enjoyable) tool to work with would be great.

If having IFC support in SU would be a good thing, why not? I defy anyone to look at what Spirit can do and not think that potentially there is a big missed opportunity. Even if all the functionality does is extend and improve the ability of SU to integrate with CAD applications in a similar way to Spirit, it would be a fantastic productivity boost.

George Bernard Shaw wrote, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Putting up with a sub-optimal situation denies progress. I'm sure lots of users took the view that Sketchup wasn't great at complex curved geometry, so why should they bother trying. SketchUp has had such amazing advances due to some of the amazingly talented and generous plugin writers here, that this sort of thing ought to be perfectly achievable.

The debate isn't about whether IFC support should be implemented, because I think the benefits (at least for some users) are self-evident.

The questions for me are therefore about 'who', 'what' and 'how', not 'why'.

@arcad-uk said:

So what do you think BIM offers that can't be done already?

Exchange data via IFC with other applications. I use SU with Vectorworks to prepare tender drawings. The import process is not 'intelligent' though and I get dumb geometry. If you have seen the German application Sprit (http://www.softtech.com/) which allows the whole round trip to and from SketchUp, it looks brilliant. Imagine having that facility with all the BIM modellers.

I agree with you about SU being one of the best design tools. Re-doing a SketchUp model in Revit is a bit like tracing a drawing in wax crayon!
I just think that the power could be leveraged to make SU more powerful - for people that want this.

I design my buildings entirely in SU, even down to doors and architraves. I would love to be able to translate this into a format that the rest of the design team can collaborate on. If the march towards BIM continues, I fear for smaller companies.

The simple answer to your question is that I work in local government, and due to resource limitations, we let all out major contracts using a D&B type arrangement. For everyone not in the UK, Design and Build is a form of contract we use, where the client provides a set of Employer's Requirements (which can be as simple as an outline brief, or a complex as a completed design including specification) which are sent out to tender for the contractor's consultant team to develop. The contractor in effect 'buys' the risk which produces a building which is more predictable in terms of time & cost than the alternative approaches, but also produces the most competitive prices.

If you manage the process properly (openly, collaboratively and fairly) you don't have to end up with compromises in design quality.

Hi all,

Recently I have experienced an interesting situation which gives me reason to hope (again) that someone will implement a BIM framework for SketchUp using IFC.

I produced some initial design work for a large building in SketchUp, that was passed on to a large multidisciplinary practice to complete the design to construction stage. Instead of taking my 3d model, with all my carefully-detailed junctions and details, they recreated it in Revit - crudely. This lost a lot of the design sophistication, which had to be added back in manually later. Even then, some of it was still missing. Apart from the fact that some of the architectural subtlety was lost, it took quite a bit of time for them to recreate the model.

Once created, there was no way I could take the model back, play around with it and send it back with modifications/suggestions for development. Several of you may be aware of Secom's free IFC2skp plugin, which in theory would allow us to import 3d BIM data, but there is no way to get the information back out.

I accept the view that SketchUp is a design tool, not necessarily a BIM tool, and it does a different job - bit only up to a point.

Use of BIM is being required more and more often on large projects, and small companies that don't have the money to invest in hardware, software and training will be left out in the cold. I love using SU for designing, and don't want to use anything else. If the trend to prescribing BIm and making it a contract condition persists, more and more of us won't have the opportunity to use SU as much as we would like, and the quasi monopoly that AutoDesk have with BIM with Revit will get worse.

There are lots of plugin writers creating routines for doors, windows, walls, rafters, slabs etc. All the stuff that BIM uses. If we had a unified framework to attach IFC data to these, and a means of translating the skp data to IFC, then I believe we have all we need. Users wouldn't have to use the BIM/IFC stuff, but if a framework existed, any plugin writer could make use of it - if they wanted. There is a good chance we could continue to use SketchUp in the way we all love, with the tools we are used to, but also benefit from BIM if we need it. The whole building industry is moving towards BIM, and if we are not careful, we'll be left behind...

Thoughts?

Guys,

The best place for this kind of discussion is the Podium forum, you would have got a definitive answer a long time ago.
As a rule, the team don't follow Podium discussions on other forums, I only found this because clay posted a link on our site.

This is the long-standing textured components issue that has been plaguing us for some time. We are working on it, but until we get a fix, the solution is to explode the components. Generally you can regroup/recomponentise them afterwards.

We do have a V2 trial version

Does anyone know whether this plugin will allow the scale of the texture to remain constant even when the scale of a component or group it is related to changes?

This can be either the texture mapped directly to the faces within a group or component or to the group/component itself.

That tutorial is unfortunately obsolete now and we are taking it down. When I wrote it, the code for Podium was different. To increase speed, the radius of the omnis was changed and now it isn't possible to get the same results with omnis that you used to.

However, if you want to create downward-pointing lights, spotlights do give some nice soft lighting effects, similar to the old omnis. Tuts3d has posted a model on the Podium forum (the best place to post questions like this) with some really nice spotlights you can use as templates.

If you look here (http://supodiumforum.websitetoolbox.com/post?id=1682792&highlight=spot+light&trail=15) you will see the last post on the first page has some great lights.

I might update it, but it depends on the timing of V2

[Edit: I'm fairly sure that the presets don't change the omni softness in the slightest]

This is what you would expect from a NURBS modeler like MoI.

You can't get true circles because SketchUp is a 3d polygonal modeler, not a 3d NURBS one. The purpose of drawing circles is to extrude them (otherwise it would be a 2d package) and when they are extruded, they create a series of polygonal faces. Only NURBS modelers like Rhino or MoI can create extruded true circles I believe.

The E+ plugin is tricky to use. It's really still beta and a little unpredictable. As such it needs a lot of patience. It lacks a couple of critical features IMO, in particular the ability to copy E+ zones with data attached. As a result, if you have a model with lots of otherwise identical areas, you are in for a torrid time, and entry of your E+ data will be a little time-consuming. That said, I am reliably informed by people that know a lot about this stuff, that it is the most advanced and complex analytical engine for energy evaluation. Apparently it can do things that no other evaluation tools can. This is the 'daddy' but needs some time spent to get the best out of it. Peter Ellis, who I think is in charge of the project, is a good guy and responds to e-mail. They need help developing the tool, and when it evolves, it will be awesome. And free.

I haven't used IES, but have heard only good things about the SketchUp IES plugin, and only bad things about IES without it It's also expensive.

Just accept and don't worry about it

I think you will always have facets, because that's how Autocad displays curves. Have you tried changing the curve resolution in Autocad first? You do this by altering the VIEWRES variable. Have a look here (http://autocadsolutions.wordpress.com/), it might help.

Failing that, you could try to see if Rhino, a vector-based NURBS modeller deals with dwg files any differently.

Ah yes, I see why it is tricky using DCs - all the trimming around irregular shapes would have to be done afterwards.
Perhaps Profilemaker could create the roof surface automatically.

I am reminded of the LWCad videos here (http://www.wtools3d.com/swf/online_help/LWCAD_30/detailed_sidewalks/detailed_sidewalks.htm) and here (http://www.wtools3d.com/swf/online_help/LWCAD_30/shingles/shingles.htm) showing trimming roof tiles and paving being automatically applied and trimmed to irregularly-shaped surfaces.

Something like this in SU would be amazing! I would pay for it without a second's hesitation.

This is precisely the thing that you could be using DCs for. There is no point in creating a Ruby script for something that can be easily achieved with a dynamic component.

Try them, with a little experimentation, you'll come to love them!

This link has been posted before. It looks cool, but it's early days!

For me, Google simply needs to focus more on 'core' features. Fast, accurate modelling which will work smoothly with large and complex (or even tiny and complex) models, with a wide enough range of modelling tools to suit all but the most demanding users. Silver shadow, solo and others have shown us that you can model more or less anything with SU with the right plugins, determination and skill.

The only ways the core can really be improved are (IMO) :-

1. Better manipulation of complex geometry
2. Fix Shadows
3. More options for working with curved surfaces - Loft tool please!
4. More options for texture mapping
5. More options for tighter integration with 3rd party plugins - Python support sounds cool, and not too difficult
6. More import/export formats - the real key to broader acceptance and use

Things like Style Builder I think are a distraction. Not many people really wanted this. Yes it might be nice for some, but I never use them at all. They are the sort of things that really ought to be worked on when the core is really well-tuned.

I would quite like to see some extensions to DC as well, and for them to be coded in C not Ruby. I'm having difficulty using multiple nested arrays inside components, and would like the option to substitute components based on formula values.

With a lot of the recent criticism, it is easy to forget how good SU still is. Because it is so easy, many of us are pushing it beyond its current capabilities in terms of 3d manipulation. This is a good thing and an opportunity and I'm sure Google realises this - in its own way.

I do want this stuff to happen in the next 6 months though, or I'm going to start looking at MoI. That doesn't mean I'll necessarily switch, but that my requirements and abilities have progressed a little and that SU isn't perhaps the ideal tool for most of my 3d work any more.

Here is the component - kind of complete. I have a slight issue where I would like the user to be able to select between typical office loading and maximum loading. I have configured a dropdown list for this, but I would like to be able to activate it with the onclick function. I could add attributes for each loading and select between them with a combobox I guess, but I'm too lazy to do that.

The component uses an approximate calculation for the span. The load/span tables are here (http://www.bison.co.uk/products.aspx?ID=12).

I needed to select a particular beam depth based on the span, and didn't want to have too many complex nested if statements, so I calculated an approximate span to beam depth ratio and divided the overall span by it to give me an index for selecting the beam type. It seems to work pretty well so far.

Comments and observations gratefully accepted before I upload to 3DWH. I don't want to upload for general use unless I'm confident I have configured it as efficiently as possible. Feel free to modify the component if you wish.

Bison Hollowcore.skp

Cool - thanks guys! I'll try this, sounds easy enough to add an 'if..' statement to determine which flag to set for component selection. Would it be okay to upload the component here if I need a little help with the syntax?

Sorry if this has been covered elsewhere, but does anyone know if it is possible to define a component which selects one of a number of sub-components, depending upon user input?

I have created a DC of a prefabricated floor slab unit (Bison floor beams), which creates a horizontal array when the DC is stretched.

I would like to be able to configure it so that either:-

a.) There is an input box to select the slab thickness, which in turn chooses which component to insert and array

b.) Takes the span, and based on a formula (derived from manufacturer's load/span tables) automatically chooses the sub-component which corresponds to the appropriate slab thickness, and arrays it

I would prefer the second, but first of all I need to be able to use input to select a particular component to use. I could of course scale the component in the z axis, but not all the components have the same profile, and I would like to be accurate if possible!

I'm sure I have seen something mentioned about selecting components somewhere, but can't find anything now. Anyone have any ideas, information or suggestions?

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