I'm looking for a way to maximize the efficiency for grouping objects by layer in order to clean up my models imported from Revit. My current workflow is as follows:
Any tips on how to improve this workflow? Is there a plugin to do exactly what I'm already doing?
Thanks in advance!
I know that podium doesn't play well with others. I'd start with that, I had the same issue with podium.
Ok, what happens when you need to scale using the tape measure method, but the actual reference dimension is something very imprecise, i.e. ~26' 0 23/64"?
TIG,
Thank you for your timely responses. Your method indeed does work, and it achieves the "snapping" precision I was looking for, but is this generally the accepted method for unidirectionally scaling with reference?
It seems like there's a lot of extra steps to get to what I was looking for. The preferred method might almost be to use a calculator, unless the height isn't known or isn't a precise number (e.g. ~27' 6 13/32"). Drawing the extra lines and construction lines and having to re-scale in two directions to achieve a unidirectional scale with reference seems very cumbersome. I personally have no experience writing Ruby scripts and have not dedicated the time to learn it, but I figured with the collection of scripts that you in particular have written, this one would be relatively simple, yet extremely powerful.
Looking forward to hearing what you and others might think.
I have tried Fredo's scale tool, but it too uses the "bounding box" to specify base points for scaling. If you open up the file I've attached, you'll notice that I've dimensioned the vertical "bulge" of the arc. Note that the corner of the surface is not at the lowest vertical elevation.
So when I go to scale the entire object, pulling the bottom blue only grip does not refer to the "corner", it is referring to the lowest vertical elevation. Essentially, the 2nd bounding box image that I posted earlier is where I would LIKE for the bottom edge of the bounding box to be, except that I want to scale the WHOLE group unidirectionally using this smaller bounding box. In other words, the vertical "bulge" height becomes the reference height by which I want to scale.
For example, I would like to vertically scale the object referring to the 24' vertical height to a new height of 27'6". I understand that if I get out the calculator and divide the desired height by the current height, and then manually enter the scale ratio down to the nearest thousandth or even ten-thousandth, I'd get a somewhat accurate dimension.
This can get cumbersome and time consuming pretty quickly though in a larger model, particularly when I want the object to be scaled from a specific point (being limited to bounding box scaling means that I would potentially need to reposition each object which would be scaled using different scale factors).
Please let me know if I've made this any clearer or more confusing.
I think I may not have been clear enough in my previous post. I would like to scale the object based from the top of the arc to the corner of the object and not the bottom of the object (which extends vertically beyond the corners), but I still want this extreme geometry to be scaled. The image below indicates where i'd like to scale the object by, but I want the entire selection to be scaled by these reference points.
[xxl-img:t62j2bbi]http://i969.photobucket.com/albums/ae179/zxinfinity/scalebyref2.jpg[/xxl-img:t62j2bbi]
If i were to scale the arc independently, the scale factor becomes ~1.26, which would be impossible to scale to manually for the curved surface. I understand very well how the Sketchup scale tool works. In Autocad you can specify a base point from which the center of scaling will occur as well as a reference point for which you can specify a distance between them to achieve a uniform scale. In Sketchup, the only base points allowed are at the corners, or faces, or center of the bounding box.
Would it be possible to implement a plugin that allows you to specify a base and reference point and whether it's a 1d, 2d, or 3d scale? The bounding box scale works in MOST cases but just isn't flexible enough.
Hate the revive a solved and dead thread, but can this be done in 1d or 2d only scaling? I want to reference scale a group to a specific reference point, but some of complex geometry extends beyond the reference point I want to grab.
[xxl-img:2scfu4fc]http://i969.photobucket.com/albums/ae179/zxinfinity/scalebyref.jpg[/xxl-img:2scfu4fc]
Instead of scaling by the extreme geometry, would it be possible to scale using the top-most point to the corner points as a reference?
Much like Autocad, I would like to scale by base and reference length, except I want to do it unidirectionally or bidirectionally. I understand that the Tape Measure tool can do this, but it can only do this uniformly in 3d unless I'm doing something wrong.
FYI, I LOVE your extrude tools, TIG, but I wanted to let you know that I get consistent crashes with almost all of the extrude tools when I have SU Podium installed. Any way to know what the offending functions are?