Thanks, Dave.
That has been an issue that has been confounding me for years and I have not found a good work around. As always these little pearls of wisdom we glean from others really help improve work flow processes. So simple and intuitive but yet so elusive.
John
Hi CAntonis,
I use Steve Racz's Cutlist plugin. You can save it in CSV format and then open it in Excel. I use it this way all the time to generate both the final cutlist and a "rough" cutlist for furniture making. You can get the plugin here: [http://www.box.net/shared/ce18vpk36l]
John
If this is the same cutlist plugin cited in the above post by Jeff Hammond then what you need to do is make all your geometry into either a group or component before you run the plugin. My personal preference is to make things into components, I rarely use groups and then only temporarily until it is made into a component. So if you are making a simple rectangular box with an identical top and bottom, sides and front/back you will have 3 components. One component will consist of the top and bottom, the second component will consist of the two sides and the third component will consist of the front and back. For this plugin to work everthing should be either a component or group (ideally a component with an identifying name). If there is geometry that is not one of these the plugin will not give a useful cutlist. I suspect that in your situation, none of your geometry has been made into either a component or group and that is why you are getting the error message. Hopefully this helps.
John
Keep up the good work and don't get to frustrated when you get into a funk on something. Just two months ago I was proud to make a cube. And then when a client requested a folding step ladder to be made of oak with some other requirements (collapse to less than 3 1/2" in depth, 3 steps with the top one ~30 inches high, etc.) I went into panic mode knowing full well that; (1) I probably couldn't find anything quite like this anywhere (2)a mock-up would be futile until I had some "good" plans to work with and (3)my proficiency with SU was lacking. Well, after about 3 weeks of struggling with procedures it finally started to all come together. Between these forums and FWW's Design, Click, and Build I found some incredible resources to help me along. By no means am I an expert or even proficient yet, but I am finding it easier to actually figure some things out on my own. And in doing so, I can actually make some renderings that look like furniture.
Good luck and thanks to all on these forums for their input.
Rather than using the tedious method of moving a component and then attempting to get it back into the same place later, I just hide it. Single click on the component to hide then right click and choose Hide. When you want to retrieve it go to Edit and Unhide.