Components

SketchUp Components are the basic building blocks used by OpenCutList to build a Parts List.

OpenCutList primarily works on SketchUp Solid Components. These components have a volume strictly greater than 0. Components of zero volume do not appear in the SketchUp Inspector.

If the blue bounding box around a component displays as a box with a volume, there is a good chance that the component will be visible to OpenCutList.

From Components to Parts

To ensure the most meaningful results, several assumptions have been made while developing OpenCutList. It is essential to follow these guidelines for best results:

• Use components for modeling your project (scaled components are also supported), because only components will appear in the Part 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 Part 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 and thickness cannot be swapped in wood.

• Apply SketchUp material to your components and configure its parameters through the Materials tab.

Materials 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 oriented 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 the blue bounding box of a component (provided by Sketchup itself) to compute its length, width and thickness. This is done irrespective of whether the component has an irregular shape, holes, etc. (of course, there are some limitations to this approach). In the following example, OpenCutList will see the box below as a rectangular box, not considering the miter.

A component as seen by OpenCutList

OpenCutList only considers the blue bounding box, therefore a part is always a rectangle with a thickness.

By default, OpenCutList will consider the largest dimension of the component as the length, the shortest dimension as the thickness, and the last dimension as the width. This behavior can be changed on per-part basis.

It is also possible to configure OpenCutList so that it will never guess the dimensions, but always consider 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.