Reporting on Areas

once again I ask for areas.

It would be so great, cause most costs in early time of designing depend on areas more than on volumes.

Costs per m2 would complete your program so wunderfull - and it would be the only plugg-in for Sketchup solving that problem.

Please try it and give me an answer.

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on February 28, 2011 at 10:41pm

For areas, you will need to multiply the proper dimensions your self.

Use: %w-m% for the width in meters, %d-m% for depth, and/or %h-m% for height.

These can be included in a calculation string.

See: substitutions

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Permalink Reply by Gerald Neuber on March 1, 2011 at 12:05am

Dear Al Hart, this may only work with rectangulars.

No triangle no "L" and especially nothing complicated irregular...

So really I ask, would it not be easier to use the SketchUp-integrated area-infomation?

And when you only need one surface of an volume - the upside of a floor another side for a wall - how to manage this different calculatings in real use. And when you once have rotatet an entitie can you longer be sure to use the right terms?

Gerald

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on March 1, 2011 at 7:04am

I am not familiar with the SketchUp integrated area information. Can you point me in the proper direction.

Note: If you are using Dynamic Components, then it is possible the area may already be available as a DC attribute. If you are not using Dynamic Components, then you may want to create them ofr your application and use DC attributes to calculate the area desired.

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on March 1, 2011 at 8:24am

Gerald sent a reminder that you can get the area of a face from SketchUp:

We could use that to let the user set an "area" attribute for a component, and then scale it properly if the component instance was scaled.

It would work like this:

To define and use areas for a component:

Add a new attribute, and use %a% in its calculation.
(Or %a-m% for square meters, %a-cm% for square centimeters or %a-f% for square feet.)
After placing your component in a model, right click on it and select Define Area
Select a face in the component to be used as the area.

Note: This feature will only work if a single face in the component can be used to calculate the area.

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on March 6, 2011 at 12:06pm

This is working pretty well.

Some component have a face which represents the area you want to report. So just right click on the component, select "SpaceDesign: Define Area", and select a face in any instance of the component.

For some Components, this may not be possible.

In the report below, both walls are the same Component, but 1 is scaled in the Z-direction. The area only had to be defined for one instance, and it was scaled properly to match the second component. (Susan does not have an area because we did not define an area for her - we could have if we had wanted to)

Look for this is a release of SpaceDesign next week.

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Permalink Reply by Gerald Neuber on March 7, 2011 at 12:08am

Dear Al Hart,

I'm really exited for the release!

Thanks,

Gerald

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on March 18, 2011 at 6:57am

Sorry, the release got held up.

I received a request from another user to report on linear lengths, in addition to areas and volumes. It is hard to draw linear items in SketchUp. (The pencil tool does strange things if you follow the edge of an existing face, or it you click on a point already in the path), so we decided to write a new tool to create linear objects (conduit, wire, pipes, etc.) where each segment would be a separate group, or the entire object would be a group, and use them for reporting. I have not completed this yet, so I will remove it any try to put out a new version today.

If I am successful, I will post it here in this thread, so you, (and others), can try the area stuff, before we post it to the download site.

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Permalink Reply by Rich Hart on March 18, 2011 at 9:53am

We uploaded the new version, KC18, with the define area function added as a right click choice: "SpaceDesign/define area"..

It can be dowloaded from this link:

SpaceDesign_KC18sd.zip

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on March 18, 2011 at 11:29am

If anyone gets a chance to try this, let us know.

We don't want to post it to the doenload area until it has had a little more testing.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Vajda on March 20, 2011 at 12:48am

I agree a generalized reporting tool that exports areas and distance would generate some very useful information from sketchup models. Estimating, site planning ratios, wall opening percentages, etc.

Will this plugin might work in on mac OSX?