Posts made by kstrach

Hi John,

Thank you very much for looking into this issue. If I'm understanding you correctly, the DC re-sizing works for you on your Mac (yet still gives the Ruby Console error)? That's really interesting if that's the case.

After many hours of re-drawing the same door frame over and over again, I decided to slowly replace parts from my test shelves to try to figure out at what point the DC stopped working correctly. As soon as I modified the Parent name from my working shelves, I noticed that the re-size stopped working, and then it hit me...I've been using the same name for every component and sub-component, even after re-drawing everything multiple times! As it turns out, the use of an ampersand (&) in the Parent name caused the re-size references to stop working correctly. It makes complete sense now that I think about it (I'm not a programmer, but I have had a little bit of exposure every now and then); I just wish I had known about this sooner...it could have saved me 6 hours or so This is probably really obvious to anyone who is well versed in DCs, but I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere in the Sketchup documents. I'm guessing that there is a list of forbidden characters somewhere, but I've obviously missed it. I attached the completed door frame, so hopefully my experience can save someone else from the frustration that I just endured

• Kris

dynamic components_door frame resize_test 003.skp

Hi everyone!

First an introduction; I've been a SketchUp user for about 6 months now and have been eager to learn everything I can about this program. I'm currently using Google SketchUp Pro v.8.0.4811 on Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit. I've just started working with dynamic components, and have so far succeeded in creating simple animations such as moving drawers, chairs, and simple scaling objects; nothing fancy, just the basics. However, I've recently run into two issues (maybe not related) that have been causing many hours of frustration. I definitely appreciate anyone's feedback on these issues, as I'm sure that I'm just missing something fundamental in my understanding of DCs.

The issues I'm having:

1. I'm trying to create a simple door frame for a school that contains user-selectable options based on door size. I'd eventually like the door itself to scale and open as well, but right now, I'd just be happy to have the frame scale correctly. I've broken the frame into 3 sub-components, and would like to have the user input the desired door width (28", 29", 30", 32", 34" & 36"), and have the width of the frame scale accordingly. The two vertical columns need to maintain their width (2" trim; 2.5" component width), and the horizontal frame piece needs to be resized accordingly. What is frustrating to me is that I have already created a simple shelf (included in my attachment) that allows the user to resize width, depth, height, and shelf width with no issues whatsoever; everything seems to work perfectly. However, when I try similar settings with my door frame, both the parent component and the horizontal shelf fail to scale correctly.

2. I noticed that when I check in the component attributes window, certain values that I drew to be exact (such as the vertical door frame #1; lenX) initially showed up at the exact values, but when clicked on to modify, changed slightly to an inexact value. For example, vertical door frame #1; lenX was drawn to be 2.5". However, when clicked on in the component attributes window, this changed to something like 2.4999985". I have added an = sign to contrain these values, but it slightly stretches other parts of the sub-component. Has anyone else experienced this, and is there something I can do to prevent it?

If anyone has any thoughts or solutions to these issues, I would greatly appreciate any advice on what I am doing wrong. Thank you very much!

• Kris

door frame resize test (DC)