Sketchup question

[Steven Peters]

I drew a kitchen cabinet that I would like to stretch to use as different width cabinets. Problem is when I stretch the box, it distorts the width of the side panels and the spacing for the drawer. I've tried grouping and locking the side panels and drawer slides but that dosen't seem to work. Does anyone have any ideas on how to fix this?

[Jason Beam]

Resizing assemblies is not quite as simple as just stretching, unfortunately. The only way I know of to do this is to move the side panel to your final destination, then edit each component part individually, select only the edges that need to move (like all the righthand vertical pieces) and then move them until they meet the outside panel. It's hard to describe, but not so bad once you're used to it.

Basically double click on a component, drag your mouse with the left button down from left to right (this is important, right to left does something different entirely) to select the edges that should be relocated. They will turn yellow. You could also just shift+click each line individually but i've found it easier to drag a "box" around say the righthand end of a rail to just select its end bits. This method also selects the parts you can't see in the current view - which is handy for retaining joinery details intact. Then the Move tool can move those edges to wherever you want - effectively stretching the component since you're only moving a few parts of it instead of the whole thing.

The scale tool works on the entire component and that's truly not what we're trying to do when we want to lengthen a cabinet. In reality we only want to change the sizes of specific parts of the cabinet. This is why the scale tool doesn't work the way many of us might expect. It scales everything, not just what we think it should.

[Steven Peters]

OK, thanks for the help. I guess I just have to do it the hard way. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm assuming that I will have the same problem if I try to model raised panel doors.

[Steven Peters]

On a completely unrelated note, I've just discovered sketchyphysics. I don't think it will help me with the cabinet stretching, but it did show me what happens when you build without nails or glue.

[Jason Beam]

I hadn't heard of that - i'll go check it out

Edit: Whoa .. crazy stuff!!

[John Schreiber]

OK, thanks for the help. I guess I just have to do it the hard way. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm assuming that I will have the same problem if I try to model raised panel doors.

That's a problem I know people are working on, but I haven't heard of a solution yet. It's a tough nut because it requires that the program know what things can stretch and what things can't.

[Steven Peters]

I think you can use sketchyphysics to animate doors and drawers opening, but otherwise it's not particularly useful for what we do.You could use it to add a little bit of flash for your presentations to your customers.

[Steven Peters]

I found a ruby console that I might be able to edit to make cabinets (cab.rb) but that has to wait until later.

I'm building this wall unit for my living room. Do you think that I should add doors to the top section or just some lights?