In this article let us discuss the amazing functionality of a productive SketchUp Plugin called FlexTool which produces dynamic components inside SketchUp and thus your workflow will be humming with joy.

(Maintaining the help pages is tough.When architects visualize a design in their mind, they blueprint the design in the virtual world through SketchUp. I now also added an animation showing this which I hope will help explain it - check the key features section:

There is a short blurb about it here: Learn WallCutter – FlexTools. This is for example when you want to add trim around a wallcutting window and you don’t want the trim to affect the size of the opening. In any case, Exclude / Include are there so you can mark which sub-components affect or don’t affect the wallcutter algorithm. More info here: Learn Component Finder – FlexTools You can save components quickly, browse your locally saved folders and find what you need with a quick search, and it can be used with all of your components (It’s not limited to flex components). This is what ComponentFinder is great for. Yes, you can definitely save your edited favorite components aside for quick insertion later. Remove Cuts > Make Changes > Refresh:Ĭonclusion: It’s best to stick with components! There are some cases where wallcutter can fail, even with walls that are components! But I believe we got all of those edge cases covered with 3 simple steps as described in the advanced operations section on the wallcutter help page. And working with wall cutter is all about the speed and fun! It’s an unexpected behavior and totally not fun when you want to make quick changes later. Close Sketchup and then re-open the model, if you have a wallcutter on a group, sometimes (not always!?) the opening will not be dynamic anymore - We’ve had a few customers build whole models with lots and lots of windows placed on groups, and then when they re-opened the model… all the openings became non-dynamic (broken).

The copied wall will immediately screw up with geometry flying/becoming deleted.Įxample 3: In some cases, once you save the model. Removing Cuts, then making the window or wall unique, and then refreshing… sometimes will work, and sometimes it won’t.Įxample 2: If you place a wallcutter window onto a wall that is a group. If you move the window within the copy… the first face will be cut, and the second will fail. If you move the window in the original component everything will be fine. Well, yes, in most cases the wallcutter feature will cut openings in groups and in raw geometry without any issues, just like it works on components, but… then there are cases where it is best to stick with components to be on the safe side!Įxample 1: if you place a wallcutter window onto raw geometry, then select all the raw geometry and the window and make a component our of them (so now the window is inside the new component, placed within the raw geometry).

Flex tools plugin sketchup