hi guys,

Thanks for the comments, and thanks for highlighting my work.

Haven't done any modelling in a while but after noticing this was getting some hits think I will 'pick up the mouse' again.

Ian.

At the very top of the view menu there is a sub menu for 'tool palettes'

In there you will find all the "undocked" tool sets. Simply chose which ones you want there and arrange them on screen.

i'd like to add one more clause:

attributes should have there units defined
leaving attributes with default 'text' units may be fine for everyone when you stay in imperial models but soon as you insert a component with ill-defined attribute units into a metric model things can get a little funky. So if a number is in inches make sure its attribute unit is 'inches' and not 'text' or 'decimal number'

p.s. thanks to sketchup for this great feature - transparently supporting imperial and metric units simultaneously.

Does anyone have a clear idea of how the uniqueness of a DC works?

I keep getting very confused. Sometimes making one kind of a change to one DC will affect its 'sisters' sometimes it wont. For example the formulae controlling material weirdly seems to be less unique than the formulae controlling position but i'm not really sure in what way.

So far I think that :
any instance of a DC in a model is basically unique, if you edit one you will have to replace it everywhere and re-enter is unique attribute values? - there is no way to edit the 'mother' DC ?
But for example if you have copies of a DC inside another DC you can edit them all togethor (their attributes at least) as long as you do it from the level above i.e. having selected the containing DC. I think this only applies to DCs multiplied by the copies attribute and not manually duplicated? If you go into the component and edit one it will only apply to one of the copies.

So I seem to spend a lot of time replacing my copies attributes with 0s then entering into the stack until the level above the component whose attributes I want to change then coming back and replacing my copies attributes as I go. It would help no end if you could see all the way into a DC stack from the top in the component attributes window.

I guess if i was a coder and not a visual sketcher type this might all seem straightforward? but i don't quite get it.

Hi sketchupers,

I have a problem I cant work out the solution to:

I want DC to draw a segment of a circle including n degrees.

i.e. I want to be able to divide a circle into any number of (pie slice shaped) sections based on a variable.

any ideas?

A bit more detail:

I created a dynamic component for drawing out a tower form based on the motion of a mechanical iris, it's here: (or in the 3d warehouse)
http://ianruaraidh.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/using-sketchup-dynamic-components-2/

I wanted to make a new improved version, which had as a parameter the number of segments the tower was divided into. I realise I can do this with triangles again by scaling the triangle differently in two directions to alter its shape and so the angle at its vertex. However, what I would really like to do is base it on segments of a circle ( so that the outer edge of the tower is more obviously different from the other edges ) so the scaling technique will not work as it will distort the curve.

I could of course remake the original (with a fixed number of segments) with a curved edge, or build different versions for each number of divisions, but both of these seems like a cop out, so any ideas?