Hi Igor, thanks for the additional explanation - I can see that something like 2 boxes touching each other is going to be a problem, I guess because SketchUp does not seem to include a good selection mechanism for that case?
The same problem seems to happen just drawing in SketchUp directly, for example if I draw 2 adjacent squares in SketchUP and then push/pull each of them up, then triple-clicking gives the same effect of selecting both pieces together and not just one of the boxes.
Is the only solution to this selection difficulty in SketchUp to use groups? If so you may want to request some other kinds of selection options in SketchUp, something being able to select 1 individual solid instead of always selecting everything connected to every vertex.
In some programs a way to avoid this would be to have each object just have independent vertices instead of being connected together. But as far as I could tell SketchUp does not like to have more than 1 vertex stacked up on the same exact location, in fact it doesn't even seem to like to have any vertices closer than 0.001 inches apart from one another.
You might try looking for a plugin that would automatically assign all polygons that make up a closed solid into its own group, something like that would possibly solve the problem for you currently.
> The core foundation of working in Sketchup is that any
> closed volume and even polygon must be group
Sorry, I'm not sure if I understand this part - if you just draw some polygons and lines and push/pull in SketchUp, aren't those basic things created just as simple geometry and not as a group unless you specifically group them later on?
Also one thing that could be troublesome is that editing of geometry in groups seems to be done kind of differently, from what I can see you can't just immediately push/pull on a face that's in a group, you first have to double-click on the group to put it into a kind of edit mode first? I would be a bit worried that some people might get confused with this and think that their exported geometry was not actually editable since it behaved differently from regular simple drawn objects...
> (amendments in api have also been made)
So unfortunately in newer versions of their API they have dropped support for the particular compiler that I'm using (it's a bit older one), and they only distribute the API as an already compiled binary DLL only and not as a source library that could be compiled anywhere. So this unfortunately makes it somewhat difficult for me to use their newer APIs.
But it would be nice if they would just consider any closed set of polygons to be a solid, rather than having to mark it in some special way or create it as some specialized kind of entity or something like that.
What happens with objects brought in from previous versions of SketchUp? Like for example if you had a box in SketchUp 6, and you bring it into the new SketchUp does it not consider it to be a solid?
- Michael
|