Components
SketchUp Components are the basic building blocks used by OpenCutList to build a Parts List.
OpenCutList will primarily look at SketchUp Solid Components, that is components with a volume strictly greater than 0. If your component has no volume, then the SketchUp Inspector will not display a volume. For OpenCutList this means only two dimensions can be extracted, but it needs length, width and thickness to define a part.
If the blue bounding box around the component displays as a box with a volume, then there might be a good chance that the component will be visible in OpenCutList.
From Components to Parts
To ensure the most meaningful results, a number of assumptions have been made while developing OpenCutList. It is essential to follow these guidelines for best results:
Using components for modeling your project (scaled components are also supported), because only components will appear in the Parts List. They may be nested in groups and even inside other components.
Label the definition and the instance of your components (optional). This information will appear in the Parts List.
Correctly define the component axes to match the grain direction and/or the orientation of the part in the raw material. Usually length/width or thickness cannot be swapped in wood.
Apply SketchUp material to your components and configure its parameters through the Materials tab.
Material can be applied to parts directly from OpenCutList.
It is very important to correctly set the component axes to convey the orientation of a part and possibly the desired grain direction to OpenCutList. You may get unexpected results if you are not aware of how local axes are placed in your components.
OpenCutList will help you identify and verify that the axes are set properly.
SketchUp Groups are not supported to describe parts.
Bounding Box and Dimensions
OpenCutList uses SketchUp's blue bounding box of a component to compute length, width and thickness. If your component has an irregular shape or holes, only the bounding box will be used to compute length, width and thickness. There are some limitations to this approach. OpenCutList will see the box below as a rectangular box, not considering the miter.
OpenCutList only considers the blue bounding box, therefore a part is always a rectangle with a thickness.
By default, OpenCutList will interpret the largest dimension of the component as the length, the shortest dimension as the thickness and the last dimension as the width. This interpretation can be changed on per part basis, when it does not apply.
You can also configure OpenCutList so that it will never guess the dimensions, but always use the dimension along the local red axis as length, the green axis as width and the blue axis as thickness.
OpenCutList does not consider components with zero volume. Components must be Solid Components in SketchUp.
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