Sections for John McM

[SketchUp Guru]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KV1BmWveeU
I did this little animation using various sections and pages. Thought you might find it interesting if entirely useless. Actually, the point is, each page has a different section cut made. SU makes the transitions between in the slideshow. SUPro5 allows export of animations as AVIs so it was a simple thing to show.

This Youtube thing might be a good way to go after all.

 

[John McM]

Yo Dave, that worked great. Your right, Youtube seems to be the way. Thanks for all your support, you really have got me over the major learning curve.
Cheers
John McM

 

[SketchUp Guru]

John, glad to help.

I did this for someone else regarding the setting up of section planes. Thought I might as well post it here as well.

Here's the quick version.

Note I have the sections tool bar turned on. See the red arrow in the first image. I select Section Plane from the Tools menu.

A section plane is displayed. It orients itself to the surface it is lying on. In this case it is the ground plane.

Move it on to the model.

Click to set the section plane.

Select the Move tool and drag the plane where you'd like it.

I made a page for that view and selected the Section Plane tool again.

Repeat the procedure for setting the section plane. This time I chose the Rotate tool instead of the Move tool.

I made another page.

And then I turned off the section planes using the Section Plane toolbar. After this I updated the pages by right clicking on the page tabs and clicking on Update.

Repeat the above as many times as you need. Note that because SU doesn't create solids it doesn't create faces on the section plane. There is a Ruby script available for that which would be useful if you use section planes.

You might find section planes useful if you want to look at the inside of a joint such as a mortise with angled sides for accomodating a wedged tenon.

The animation is created by SU as it transitions from one page to the next. As I said before, I don't believe you can export the animation from GSU but you should be able to see it if you run a slideshow of the pages. You can also use some screen capture software such as Wink to capture the animation. I used wink to make all the screen captures for this and for the demo thread.

 

[John McM]

Brilliant Dave, that explains it exactly. I've had a go and it worked fine. I want to use sections in my working drawings on a separate page along with the traditional elevations on their own page. Got it sorted now, in fact I can't believe how far I have come using SU. That's down to you. Top man and thanks again for all your help.
John McM