My interest in learning how to modify an existing component (or group) to be used with HPT is not necessarily related to 3DW although that can occasionally come into play.

My issue is that I'm working with a large building that has a lot of things already fabricated. Some of these have prebuilt components incorporated into them (the aforementioned closers and handles) and some were built from scratch in Sketchup (interior commercial grade windows with a a dozen mullion components).

I can easily build a cutting component from scratch (Justin shows how to do this) but that's not my issue.

This building has a lot of places where it would be nice if I could take existing components (recessed lights, doors, Fire Extinguisher stations, etc.) and add hole punching capabilities to them. Obviously I'm not, for example, going to build out a fire extinguisher from scratch when I can just grab a pre-built one from elsewhere), but I also don't want to explode said FE or the box in which it is contained. Same for a door with a pneumatic closer.

Thanks for the insights!

Dan

In my case, I was able to make the 3DW recessed light punch a hole (by fully exploding it) but I couldn't make my complex doors that I assembled (and which have a few 3DW components like the closers and the handles), punch.

I think, in the door's case, the issue is not just that there are lots of nested components (primarily the handles and the closers) but also, that a door frame is not a continuous loop so you have to add an additional cutter to the component. I just haven't been able to make that work so precutting a hole is probably my only solution that I've been able to discern.

I'd love to be pointed to a video where I could learn how to mod an existing complex component (that has nested sub-components) to allow it to use the HPT.

Note that the image below is a door shown without the additional cutting loop. I have a few I've added a loop to and they still don't cut for some reason.

Thanks for the responses guys.

So I read through all of the posts in this thread and found someone who said that they exploded out all the nested components.

In my example, the recessed light (which I grabbed from 3Dwarehouse) had dozens of nested components. So I exploded all those out to groups, made the entire thing a single component, and viola, the punch works!

Nearly all the tutorials on how to use this plugin assume the user is building a cutting component from scratch, as opposed to using a pre-built component that has sub-components. To use a complex component with lots of nested components I had to do this:

1. explode all nested components back to just groups
2. Select the parent object and make it a component
3. Choose an existing surface in the newly created component that will act as the cutting plane and set the axes such that the blue is perpendicular to the component.

This process worked for the recessed light but...

I have doors I'd like to be able to punch walls with. These have handles, pneumatic closers, windows of various sizes, etc., all of which must remain as nested components. So I'm not sure how to convert those doors into something that will cut. Adding to the complexity, because the doors have windows cut into them, I would end up with components that have two cutting surfaces (one to punch a window into the door slab and one for the door frame to punch through the wall. Maybe not possible.

I know that the last post to this thread was 3 years ago, but I'm wondering if this plugin still works for SU 2022?

I've tried it but when I punch, the component glues to the inside of the BACK face rather than the outer of the front. Initially the component does glue to the front/bottom face but after the punch it inserts back the equivalent of the thickness of the ceiling.